Bears. Regular bears. Whenever they turn up, they end up rolling ridiculously well. They've killed player characters almost every time. I have no idea why, but bears are now more feared than dragons.
I especially LOVED the monsters that were common-ish, cause of course the most widely feared monsters are the ones that your town will encounter semi-regularly. Sure, world-eating dragons are scary but if you’ve seen a giant axalotle destroy ships in your harbour several times, then you’re gonna have nightmares about them for life
In my case, there's this creatures we call "Black Watchers" They are some failed experiments from a being able to manipulate shadows. They are tall, humanoid slim figures with no face and 7 eyes floating around their head. They are incredibly swift and hard to detect, and the only way to kill one is destroying all 7 eyes, at which point the creature will blow up in a shadow blast. Problem is, if one of this things sees you, your main issue is going to be the 8 foot tall shadow person running towards you at max speed, plus the others it will have alerted. Let me tell you, people. you put one or two of these in a forest at night, or some castle ruins, and your party will have a BAD time.
When I ran my Eberron campaign, I used Living Spells as bosses fairly often. One of the first ones I introduced was a Living Stinking Cloud. The party was on their way to clean up some yuan-ti, but they found them all dead... of poison damage? They didn't know it then, but the Living Stinking Cloud had been sent to slay the yuan-ti as a test run of its abilities. The main villain was capable of making and controlling Living Spells, and one of the enhancements he'd given to them was to ignore Resistance to whatever damage type the Living Spell dealt, but to also deal half damage to creatures with Immunitity to a damage type. It, of course, was immune to Poison and the yuan-ti tend to rely heavily on that, so it was terrifying for the party to see their recurring enemies poisoned. When they fought it, it started making little gas pockets that grew larger each round. They had to deal with it pronto, but the party leader was a paladin who smote it just quickly enough to keep things from getting really out of hand. Every Living Spell encounter after that was always a big deal.
I got some silly yet very dangerous creatures. Ameowlgams are cat-like experiments gone rogue, able to mimic both the living and non-living. The only way they can grow bigger is if they combine with another ameowlgam. They can change form at will, often times using this to traverse hostile areas. If there is a big enough ameowlgam they can even try to mimic one’s fighting style. They are sometimes kept as pets, being similar to perhaps a mix of a slime and a cat. They occasionally try to get cat-like beings to mix in, but will not force them to join. Some people even use them as artificial limbs in exchange for safety or food
Among the scariest well-known creatures in my setting have to be the extremely rare mutation of Chromatic Dragon known as "Royal Dragons". While physiologically, they match their parents in every regard, the distinctive trait of a Royal Dragon is exceptional psychic power - primarily the ability to mentally dominate other creatures, even other dragons, and hold thousands of individuals in thrall. These powers often make them power-hungry, primarily of a political sort. No fewer than four entire city-states have been secretly formed by a Royal Dragon in recorded history, only falling when something caused their psionic hold on their people to break or the dragon was discovered and slain. It's for this reason that many nations now have multiple safeguards in place to ensure someone taking the helm of a country isn't actually a Royal Dragon in disguise. Luckily, Royal Dragons are so exceedingly rare thanks to their own kind, with most being slain shortly after hatching. The parents themselves will often notice the signs of one of their hatchlings being a Royal Dragon when it has enthralled its broodmates, who serve its every whim, and then kill it to avoid the risk of their own child attempting to (and potentially succeeding in) psionically dominate them. Still, the threat posed by these dragons is so great that the ruling class of most nations have entire stories using Royal Dragons as an allegory for one lesson or another - as while none have managed to found a proper nation for one reason or another, none of them want to risk theirs falling into the hands of a power-hungry psychic lizard bent on enslaving their minds.
In my setting, I've supercharged the Leviathans, as I thought it would be an interesting lore tidbit. Leviathans are few, but mighty, capable of unleashing worldwide devastation if provoked. Sailing is a rarity, save for those brave (or foolish) enough to do so. While most are docile, when one sets their sights on a passing ship, those aboard should say their prayers. Once, there was a kingdom that declared war on a Leviathan that wandered too close to their shores. Naturally, this ended how you might expect: with the entire country nuked from existence, forever unable to sustain life. All avoid the region out of fear of never returning. The scariest part? Someone recently defeated a Levaiathan single-handedly, and this person is the BBEG.
They may take any form. Appearing almost anywhere or when. Bringing ruin, war or simply showering gold throughout the realms. Yes, they are the most terrifying, unpredictable of all things. These are the Player Characters.
The Nightmarechild A being from beyond the known realms, is mere appearance causing two realms to collide into each other, creating a new one. It proceeded to feed on this realm, starting from the top, as it killed the gods of both former realms. I’d armies unstoppable, it’s presence uncomprehendable, through rash means civilization managed to barely survive and 100 years later it seems to have vanished, yet it’s presence is still felt in every corner of the world.
In my campaign it’s a water genasi assassin named Mudlow (Genasis work a bit different in my campaign like for example they can turn into their element temporarily) he can be hired by anyone who knows him and people that know how to reach him. He goes after anyone and kills even his contract givers if they do not believe in his ideals or are overall just bad people in his view.
My old DM, Laird, came up with a few. A couple that I still remember. Ogrillith: A cross between a common ogre, and a merilith (six armed demon with a snake's body where her legs should be). The result, a six armed ogre who is faster, smarter, and tougher than regular ogres. They're also immune to weapons that aren't at least of +1 enchantment. Cyri-Hydra (aka a Hydralisk): A cross between a basilisk and a hydra. Originally created by priests and wizards devoted to Cyric, God of Murder, they were initially called the Cyri-Hydra. When they began breeding true and spreading across The Realms, others started calling them hydralisks. Physically, they pretty much look like eight legged hydras, with three to eight heads (1d6+2). The heads have a petrifying gaze attack, which is far more difficult to avoid because of the multiple heads. Its also immune to weapons that are not at least of +1 enchantment. The creature's eyesight is even worse than that of the basilisk, bordering on complete blindness, so the likelihood of it accidentally petrifying itself is practically none. It does, however, have extremely keen hearing and sense of smell, nearly equal to that of a grimlock. One beneficial thing about this monster is that if an ordinary item is completely covered in its blood, there is a 5% chance (96 to 100 on percentile dice) of it spontaneously becoming enchanted. This makes their blood very valuable to enchanters.
oh, I totally forgot about my homebrewed demon creatures: based on the bugs in Mimic, they were kidnapping people and objects with magic, and the party was tasked with looking into several disappearances. they could swift action teleport, fly, react to magic being cast, absorb it, and learn to cast it right back. plus, hitting a spellcaster allowed them to steal a random highest level spell they knew and that level slot. they were draining people and items to power portals to bring more onto this plane. thw casters were running scared, but the creatures could teleport right to them, or fly to them, strike, and teleport away. good times.
I once went with a limited omniscient being. Essentially, when it hears its proper name spoken aloud anywhere on the plane it’s currently located, it instantly knows your exact location. For a duration of 1 minute, it knows the speakers exact locale and can choose to teleport to you. If it chooses to show up (which it often does), it kills the speaker (or all those in the immediate vicinity), and teleports away with the corpse(s). Giving your players the name of that creature (essentially giving them all a TPK button), creates more story-hooks, and moral dilemmas than I ever thought I would see at a table.
Mine is something simply enough called a "Pursuing Silhouette", its mostly seen as "Just a myth" but thats because most people who have been hunted by it didnt live long enough to gain evidence of its existance ( Or if they did it wasnt believed ). It looks like a humanoid "shadow" ( Its not really a shadow ) that slowly walks towards its victim until either it can get in melee range, or they try to attack it at range where it will then attack. Instead of dealing any normal damage type, it deals what i call "Errasure" which not only deals damage you cant reduce but also has a permanent max HP reduction equal to half what is erased. Il say aswell, even those who have crossed planes to attempt to escape it have still fallen after 3 days.
5e Adaptation of the Odopi and the Kurobozu, thanks to "Dungeon Dad", those added to my Arcane Devourer (an eldritch doglike creature that feeds on arcane energy... or spell slots). With some Slow dark narration that ends up in tension, noises and the sudden noise that my players recognize as the "ho no, please dont be X monster", had make my tables enjoy and fear the encounters. and avoid certain places in the map.
Hmm, depends on the perspective. From an in universe perspective, probably Star Wraiths, astral hunters that eat hunters and people within spacefaring vessels alike. While most star wraiths are smaller and don’t pose a threat to a lightly armed ship, those such as the dragon feeder star wraith and lurker star wraith can lead even battleships to ruin. The scariest part is that they are near undetectable except by all but the best eyes while traveling through space, as their coating mimics star patterns. From the players perspective it is some oozes that they rolled really bad against in combat. They are both homebrew and the oozes were a star wraith minion so it still works out in the wraiths favor in fear factor.
In my world lore there is Atamotsoretued (Deuterostomata reversed). She looks like a gargantuan size sea lily (crinoid), so nothing too terrifying. The thing that made her so scary is that I created this entity to help a friend who was scared or disgusted by crinoids and I introduced her by describing a scene in which my friend's character gets abducted and his blood sucked by the giant entity to use biomancy. That biomancy was used to generate a small version of herself, called Bibi by my friend , which helps the party (they were also scared of Bibi at the beginning). As a result, now the players like crinoids because the two characters are actually nice.
The scariest thing I put in my setting is the simply called "The Hungry Darkness". It's a ooze-like creature from a plane of darkness which eats anything organic (flesh and plant) and can't exist in light. The scary part if you are in dim-light or darkness the ooze will try to quickly fill the space to catch and absorb you. And it is fast. It is also rather intelligent. If it's prey stays in light too long the Ooze will attempt to craft itself protection from the light from abandoned armor, debris, or whatever container they can get. Going so far to not completely eat a corpse and hiding inside it, using it as a flesh suit in order to get to other tasty morsels. Like other oozes though it doesn't do well with traveling in water. The players in one of my campaigns ran into a Hungry Darkness on a barren deserted island with an abandoned steam-punk town that was eerily quiet. It was fun watching them figure out how to maneuver around the Darkness and escape the island alive.
Humans. Like, there are dragons in that world, somewhere a thousand miles away in an unapproachable wilderness. Once ina blue moon a powerful mage might figure out how to summon a demon. Nobody knows what terror lurks in the depths of the open sea. But those are stories, hushed whispers or grandios fairytales to entertain your children. Yet, everyone knows to fear a determined and powerful human. They can't be reasoned with, they can't be deterred and they will come for you ...
My setting isn’t too fleshed out yet, and there’s probably scarier to come eventually, but currently? The dread reavers. Humanoid corpses bent and broken to the size and “shape” of a horse, a pair of extra spiked limbs to skewer any poor souls they come across, and a demiplane within their ribcage that’s about the size of a bag of holding, except creatures within don’t need to breathe, eat, sleep, or even drink. Did I mention it has a climbing speed?
In all my campaigns, there’s an urban legend Simply known as “the misery” Essentially, the misery is an ancient horror/insurance The misery seeks out dark twisted individuals and does *[Redacted]* The misery is speculated to be either a dead God‘s corpse carrying out its duties, even in the grave. something left over from the creation (even the Gods can’t remember that far back, so who knows) or The shadow of a Primal fear Evidence of the misery includes hastily scribbled sketches of “something?” (not going into details, but it kind of looks like the collector from hollow night mixed with something truly horrible from world of horror) *Thirdhand* accounts, And horrified looking shadows edged into walls, (Hiroshima and Nagasaki style) The players have only encountered it once during an evil campaign, the necromancer was trying to do something especially evil that would’ve broke campaign, so I sicked the misery on ‘em After plenty of warnings of course (breath felt on the back of the neck, cold shivers even in midday sun light, nightmares, eyes in the darkness, me straight up telling him it’s probably a bad idea to continue) He entered solo combat and lost horribly, emphasis on the horribly and then I made him promise not to tell the others to preserve the mystery and worry of finding the shadow of the necromancer screaming on the side of a building And still to this very day in my closet somewhere is the character sheet of the necromancer Locked in a box because environmental storytelling is my favorite
Silver Kobolds. Every color of kobold in this setting is different, and silver kobolds are the weirdest. For starters, they are completely averbal. Even attempts to read their thoughts just yields random noises, so while most scholars agree they can understand others, there's no certainty of what they think. Second of all, they have a dragon's tendency to hoard. They aren't quite as selective as dragons, and most of their collection tends to be junk, but they'll hoard anything they can. Sometimes even sentient beings smaller than them wind up in their hoards. Which brings up the most terrifying fact about them... Any hole they dig to a certain depth becomes the new opening for a portable hole linked to that silver kobold. And if that silver kobold dies, access to that hole is gone, banished to who knows where. Countless priceless antiquities or artifacts of unimaginable power could have been picked up and stuffed in a pocket dimension, and then lost when they absent-mindedly wander into a canyon being hit with a flash flood, or walk past a hungry pack of wolves, or get caught in a shipwreck. And if they set their mind to it, they could make an entire town simply disappear by digging around it. Silver kobolds have not actually done anything so drastic, of course. They just wander around, digging holes and staring into space with those little red eyes of theirs. But the point isn't what they've done. It's what they could do. And nobody who's not a silver kobold knows what they're going to do next...
this is mine, old creature. used to deal with murder hobbos. Void Harrower Size/Type: Large Aberration (Cosmic) Hit Points: 85 (10d10 + 30) Speed: 20 ft. Armor Class: 16 (Natural Armor) Initiative: +1 STR: 18 (+4) DEX: 12 (+1) CON: 16 (+3) INT: 14 (+2) WIS: 13 (+1) CHA: 17 (+3) Saving Throws: INT +5, WIS +4 Skills: Arcana +5, Perception +4 Damage Resistances: psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks Condition Immunities: charmed, frightened Senses: darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 14 Languages: Deep Speech, telepathy 120 ft. Challenge: 10 (5,900 XP) Special Traits Cosmic Awareness: The Void Harrower cannot be surprised and has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects. Eldritch Spawn: When the Void Harrower is reduced to half its hit points or less, it summons 2 Eldritch Spawn minions. If any Eldritch Spawn are killed, the Void Harrower can use its action to summon 2 replacements. Actions Multiattack: The Void Harrower makes two attacks: one with its Grasp of the Void and one with its Abyssal Rend. Grasp of the Void: Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 15 (2d10 + 4) psychic damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or be pulled up to 20 feet toward the Void Harrower. Abyssal Rend: Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 18 (2d12 + 4) slashing damage plus 9 (2d8) necrotic damage. Chaos Shuffle (Recharge 5-6): The Void Harrower emits an eldritch wave in a 30-foot radius. Each creature in that area must succeed on a DC 16 Dexterity saving throw or be teleported to a random unoccupied space within the area and become stunned until the end of their next turn.
Mine is probably Necrolord Nadria, one of the three lords of death whom is a spirit of a child that uses magic threads to control his mother's corpse from afar like a puppet. The most frightening part about him is not necessarily his power, but his childlike unpredictability and desire to turn everything into a game, including life or death situations. That or the undead Tarrasque with a McGuffin implanted in its chest.
I really like that first one, the apocalyptic bird hatching from the moon! I mean, you can't really top a cosmic-level threat like that, except of course, for something with the ability to erase people from existence.
@Freezer-DragginBallZ I had a dungeon with an extreme amount of doors, and all of the doorsknobs were trapped. The trap was set off by which way you turned the doorknob. To avoid the barbarian lock pick method, many of the doors were also trapped against being forced open. It was the dungeons' passive security.
Moss. I made a moss that is harmless on it own. when it comes in contact with dead or undead things it goes inside and wears is it as armor and then it becomes hostile to any living thing to spread more moss. One of the reasons why they are so scary is they are kind of hard to kill for the party due to them lacking fire damage and that being its biggest weakness. And the fact that it can combined into a giant moss monster that gets even more resistances, can regenerate (while standing on grass) and deal some nasty damage.
DM friend of mine asked for help designing a BBEG for an island/pirate based campaign. We ended up making something called the ‘Flesh Tide’. Basically an aquatic Lich wanted to create a ‘perfect body’ from several races to inhabit. Undead made from those who died at sea would rise to the surface to collect. Players did sabotage the final ritual, but the body in question mutated into an enormous mass of flesh and limbs. Without the Lich to direct it, the F.T. reverted to the gather command from earlier, absorbing all life it touched. It took several large ships at full broadside to kill it.
The campaign I’m running takes place in version of the area in Warhammer Fantasy known as the Old Word (which would be the Empire and the surrounding area) as a domain of dread from the Ravenloft setting. The most famous KNOWN creature would probably be some sort of chaos monster or vampire character from the warhammer brand, but I have a unique creature for my campaign. First thing to note is that the domain has two traits of note. One is that the whole domain is stuck in a ten year long time loop of the time leading up to and of the complete event known as the Endtimes, where the forces of chaos invade the world with the goal of destroying it. How things play out changes each time, but when the ten years are up, and someone is about to win, it resets. Second thing to note is that sometimes creatures from other realities, which add another wrench to the madness of the endtimes. One of these things was a singular mind flayer. Having a mind flayer in a setting where mind flayers don’t exist would be problem on its own, but this mind flayer is special. One, she was a half-dragon and descendant of an archdruid prior to her transformation and kept the powers, and she was also a friendly NPC from the previous cancelled dnd campaign. But most importantly, she was studying to be chronomancy wizard before being taken to the domain. Normally otherworld monsters who are taken to the domain are sent somewhere else after the time reset, but this mind flayer was able to use magic to disconnect herself from the loop. Now she acts as a focal point for all timelines past and future. Past and future memories overlap, people who are still alive discover they have been dead for years, and warriors of the faith learn that they have been reading prayer books dedicated to a different god. And whenever this this mind flayer eats the brain of someone, the brain of all time lines are eaten, and they’re gone forever.
False Hydra by far the single most mind blowing monster that is near impossible to track and kill. First it hides in plain sight in a way that counters most spells used to find things. Singing a song that makes it imperceivable by any that hear its haunting melody. Darkvision, not even close. See invisibility, nope. Detect magic, nice try. As clues start to mount you start to lose your hold on reality as NPC's that were there one day disappear the next and nobody even remembers them. Unless you figure out that you need to remove one of your senses just to be able to perceive the horror your doomed. Even then it is a formidable monster to fight against. Feel free to use this in one of your future videos. Love your videos BTW.
In a time that predates the war that reset the calendar, events unfurled that laid the foundation for the atrocious amounts of death that came from that war. Medolise Flaredon is, in simplest terms, the mortal sin of evil as a concept. She was a nun for the church of a now-forgotten god. One day, her village was attacked by a band of raiders, and she was the only survivor. She rescinded the god she worshipped, harnessed the power of an artifact called the Abyss Lantern, and ascended to the heavens and butchered every angel and god in the pantheon that she worshipped. She tore off the wings of the angels and stitched them to her own back. This event, known as "The Great Rebellion" set all divine beings in every pantheon into a great turmoil, and warred with each other. This spurned "The Holy Wars". At the end of the war, when Medolise was slain, her weapon (a cross-spear that's main tip was a zweihander,)called "Vindicta", was broken, and she fell below the deepest level of hell. The two halves of Vindicta, the zweihander and the cross-spear, became the two most powerful magical artifacts that would ever exist. A forgotten warrior picked up the zweihander called "Dainsleif" and rallied the entire warring south-eastern continent under his name alone. He marched on the east, and glassed a country-sized kingdom in a single night. The spear, now called the "Cross of Mercy" was taken by a man named Saint Vim, and he fought the forgotten warrior alone. In their final clash, both combatants died, and the weapons were lost. The conflict that was born out of the breaking of Vindicta was called the Great Capital War. Over three hundred million people died in the one month the war lasted. The aftermath was so devastating, all of civilization collectively agreed to reset the calendar. After the pieces of the world had been picked up, the gods sent down the first monsters to the world to ensure that no one would ever become something that Medolise was. Now, Medolise's name is spoken in hushed whispers, and is now long forgotten by the common folk of the world.
I had come up with some variants of the common medusa. They began as mutations caused by The Time Of Troubles in The Forgotten Realms, but have since begun to breed true. The Midasa: Physically, there's no difference between the midasa and the medusa. The difference is in their gaze attacks. Instead of turning her victims to stone, the midasa turns her victims into solid gold. Named after King Midas, her gaze can ruin an entire world's economy, by making gold as common as dirt. The Mirradusa: Again, there's no physical difference between the common medusa and the mirradusa. The difference comes when would be monster hunters try and turn her gaze attack against her. For unlike the common medusa, the mirradusa is immune to her own gaze attack, so reflecting her gaze back at her with a mirror won't work. The Mambadusa: The only difference between the common medusa and the mambadusa is that the snakes in her hair are all BLACK MAMBAS, arguably the deadliest viper in all known worlds (should look up the effects of black mamba venom for whichever version of D&D youre playing, as it tends to change from edition to edition). You can also create your own effects for black mamba venom if the game's version isn't lethal enough for you. The Minidusa: The name "minidusa" is something of a misnomer. It has nothing to do with their size. What separates the minidusa from the common medusa, or any of her other cousins for that matter, is a lack of medusa-like abilities. She has no petrifying gaze. The snakes in her hair aren't venomous. She's a totally nerfed medusa. The only thing from her heritage that she maintains is her immunity to the petrifying gaze of her fellow medusae. These medusae dont tend to live very long as they fall easy prey to monster hunters.
in-universe? probably a thing called the Darklander. basically there's a portion of the world called the Darklands which is basically a massive hellscape due to a phenomenon called the Everspell which chucks out a bunch of random (and often very harmful) magical effects across this entire region (which is basically the size of a small continent). the Darklander is one of these magical effects. the Darklander a gigantic sentient cloud of bright pink smoke that very slowly melts and fuses basically anything it comes into contact with, only issue is that it doesn't properly kill anything. anything that should die to its effects instead starts producing some of this smoke, as long as they are in contact with the smoke they will keep on coming back to life, fully concious and aware, no matter how much they are harmed by anything (including the smoke itself). eventually the body breaks down entirely and the conciousness is just left trapped in the remains, it becomes a bit of a "I have no mouth and I must scream" situation. for my players? the Water Wraith. I made some changes to fit my world's lore but I mostly just copied the whole thing from Pikmin 2. yeah... I'm not very original on the whole, I mostly just take stuff I find cool and mash it all together. I wonder if anyone will see this and know what inspired the original concept of the Darklander...
Got two, one from the old 3rd edition days and one from 5th, though the older editions were more hardcore and plentiful so I just picked one from memory. The Teratomorph . . . you've heard of the elusive ethereal ooze that hunts phase spiders and of the gut wrenching bone ooze that ignores the equipment of armies, some insane wizard wondered what would happen if you spliced them together, but the resultant abomination is worse than either component goo. Despite being a mindless monster it's unaffected by any mental effect, similarly despite being a boiling shapeless thing it's not subject to anything which would change its form either; but most confounding of all is it's ability to occasionally ignore spells as if they missed, almost akin to a blink spell dodging a sword swing. This inescapable gargantuan soap bubble is capable of flight and swim faster than any ship, it has blindsight rivaling a drow's darkvision making it a nightmare to sneak by it, it's immune to a handful of elemental hazards and resistant to the rest. On contact, regardless of it lashing out or being struck, it drains a little of all three physical abilities of whoever got involved with it. Every round it randomly planeshifts a creature in its vicinity to another random plane, which can and has been itself. And any unlucky sap that gets grappled by it is disintegrated, but those that get engulfed just seem to stop existing. It's presumed this was also the fate of the wizard who created it as nobody remembers who got the idea or where the thing came from, but the random environmental spells going off in it's wake are uncomfortably explainable. An Eyebinder in some tongues, Kalaraq Quori in others . . . the insectoid serpentine elemental looking creature is nothing to be underestimated, and those that do either don't live to tell the tale or cannot even under their own volition; some say they're invaders from the realm of shadow, others say they're rulers of dreams, either way they refuse to elaborate further. These things can also fly at will, and must have some sixth sense because they're impossible to surprise no matter if it's hostile or friendly terms; likewise trying to pull the wool over on one is a fools errand as its truesight cuts through any handcrafted or arcane deception, and they're as observant as they are cunning. While they seem fairly vulnerable to conventional injury despite their ethereal appearance, they're a nightmare to pin down as they're outright immune to most combat conditions besides being able to shrug off magic in general. But their essence is rather implacable as they don't even need to fight to make someone change their mind, and those they kill get added to their orbiting swirling collection of arcane eyes in some kind of unholy curse preventing them from being resurrected. The strangest is these things clearly have physical form yet can manifest ghostly qualities at will, favoring intangibility and possession to deny being harmed while turning people to do their own bidding. It's also unknown how many walk our streets and even less known what their goals are, but pray you never find out.
In my campaign, there is the First Hag of the World, a being that came into existence when the 3rd-generation gods(the current gods) were born during the Spell of Creation and the current multiverse came into a stable(ish) form. Whether her creation was intentional or a side effect of the Spell of Creation is unknown, but many people(and even gods) believe her existence to be necessary for the fabric of reality to remain intact. All hags can trace their bloodline directly to her. The First Hag's power is so great, people often attempt to find her instead of beseeching the gods for help, though finding her is the real trick- once a century is a frequent visitor load. If you don't pay up, though... even the gods can't save you, and a botched deal kicked off the current starting arc of my campaign.
First, the pet of the 2nd BBEG in my campaign, The Hydroose. Imagine a 17 foot draconic canadian goose that has regeneration and fire immunity. Whenever you score a crit, you behead it, but then two more heads take its place, allowing it to bite an additional time per round. Then there's the Troll Troll, keeper of the 6th dungeon. He's about the size of a goblin, but has the HP of a troll. Regardless of damage type, when he's knocked to 0 HP, his Regeneration kicks in and heals him to full. Although he only has 1 action to either attack or dodge, he has an infinite amount of Legendary Reactions to cast Counterspell. Lastly, the Dragonfly, boss of Hybrid Island. Although its presence is passed off as unimportant, this combination of Fly and Dragon will plague the party with Filth Fever. Despite not having much strength or constitution, it has an insane dexterity plus Greater Evasion and Danger Sense.
In most of my settings i always have one constant cryptid that is simply called "the Living Murder". It is a 3 undead creatures bound together in one form due to a murder so vicious and necromancy so foul. It is a skeleton with regeneration wrapped in the discarded flesh and nerves of other victims, lastly, its beating heart is a creature of it's own that when exposed burrows into the chest of a new host. The monster uses its exposed veins as spiked chains and it's nerves to deliever touch spells like shocking grasp, vampiric touch, or if it consumes enough living humanoids finger of death. It is used as a cautionary tale to warn people not to let down their guard.
In my game which i have not used yet it is known as the Adaptor The party will first meet a failed experiment that has vulnerability to all damage types then it will adapt to every bit of damage becoming nuetral then resistant until it is immune to all damage. Then once it is immune to all damage it will become vulnerable again. This is just the failed experiment They will eventually come across one that is nuetral to all damage that then become immune after damage and same process of the failed adaptor applies Then another one who is resistant to all damage with the same process. Eventually the final one know as the perfected monstrosity appears then they will find out the final one is completely immune to damage with a high perception and investigation so it can track them the party will have to get far enough away to get away from it then trap it or destroy the controll collar as that will let it be able to communicate with them. During one of their investigations into the big bad evil guy they will find a laboratory where the big bad experimented with the adaptor and created them where they learn the adaptors were humanoid races experimented on with dr*** and magic till the became huge monstrosities the failed experiment being the smallest at large size This all points to there being more than one and all look like mutated versions of there base race mostly being beast races such as tabaxi lizard folk and gnolls but also mermaids and they can still be humans or elves Oh fun fact they are no longer considered their base race and are more animalistic in mind except the perfected kind and they all can breed together meaning there are more in the games lore than the players will meet and are kinda like the deathclaws of fall out and while at first are a myth will eventually be found far and wide I used monstrosity as a descriptor not the type of monster This is all typed before i watched the video so i dont know if someone else has the same idea
In my homebrew settings, I had a kind of sea serpent. Basically the world is divided in to two continents but the continents don't know about each other really because of the ocean between them is unpassable. The continent where the players are in happens to be the 'Eastern' continent which suffered a huge cataclysm and has been broken in to four, well continent sized areas. You can travel between the continents because the oceans are shallow and dotted with Islands. The sea serpents literally are way too big to traverse it. However the Ocean in the west is deep and has all the big ones and horrors while the ocean in the east is more shallow which is a bit of perspective all considering. So the offspring of the large ones travel the shallow ocean and grow until they get too big and then head to the east and then once they grow up, they travel to the south or north to return to their original ocean. Regardless, that means that those shallow oceans are basically super dangerous to the point that anybody who tries to cross it without a plan is basically doomed. Also, to make it a bit more interesting, the only natural predator of the sea serpents are basically dragons so you might get attacked by the serpent just to have a dragon decide to get an easy meal but I wouldn't want to be there if a dragon showed up either. Basically turns any sea journey in to a real life or death adventure that you need to plan out and every island can be anything. They go to a fortress just to find it totally destroyed or you go to an Island and try to resupply just to find the entrance in to a cave styled dungeon with something fun. Almost certain death, any number of random adventures that can be thrown in. My favorite things were a kind of a sentient fish creatures that were driven from their homes thanks to a sea serpent. Mermaids that can be playful or even use/call sea serpents so they can claim whatever remains. Old forts that have lost technology/spells/books/lore. I like the lore thing cause you can give players a chance to learn more about the backstory that points them in to the direction of the BBEG. Anyways, long story long. The sea serpents are basically pretty varied, adults can be the size of islands while the smaller ones can be dozens, if not hundreds of meters long. Some are like an octopus while others are more like eels. They are both incredibly hard hitting, hard to hit, even harder to damage and can cast magic as well as defend against it. They are also incredibly intelligent, patient and cunning. It can plan traps, wait for bad weather, wait till you enter deeper water. I even once had one treat a ship like grapes, just reaching a single tendril up, grabbing one person and then disappearing with him. No sound, no sign, just one less person when the morning came. For an entire trip, one person after another until the captain forcibly grounded the ship and headed up in to the hills. Literal origin story to one of the small island towns, nobody ever ventured out to sea again. Anyway, try to convince your players to cross the ocean with these around. Ooh, and lets not forget, there is a reason they are there. Plenty of food around so plenty of other dangers.
In my own survival D&D campaign, the scariest and the most frightening thing is the personification, enbodyment and incarnation of the Death itself, which brings a constant sense of threat even if it does not kill until the time comes. It appears whenever one of the player characters is about to die or too exhauted. It can't be killed either because it's immortal and if you fight it, it just poof away says it'll be back.
It depends on the setting…I have several, across multiple systems. I’ll post some standouts. 1) The Nightmare King, Eldritch ruler of the Realm of Nightmares. His horrifying shape a conglomeration of the worst fears and nightmares the viewer has, able to erode your mind with your own fears and nightmares until nothing is left but a mindless husk that knows only terror. Direct confrontation is impossible, only facing his manifestations to drive them out. 2) Void, a humanoid Sphere of Annihilation with bizarre powers that are not any known form of magic and cannot be denied. Void has ended Empires and Gods alike, and none are exactly sure why, some say they stumbled across knowledge it considers forbidden, some say there is something it seeks. 3) The Mimic King, a Mimic so large it has disguised itself as mountains and mysterious islands. This beast is also said to be so intelligent that Dragons are no match for its mind or its age.
For the Fabula Ultima game Im planning, im going to make the D&D Tarrasque actually world ending threat. Only way to incompasitate it is a creation god-level weapon to continuously fire at it. Utilizing clocks to both charge the weapon and deplete metaphysical health will help enable such world-ending conflict.
my campaign has a bit, but are all mostly on an island off the main continent that the humans were given when they first came to the realm (Dimension hope from the help of their god as their world was dying. Fast). There are Owlbears that wait in trees and drop down on any passing creature, flowers that are a foot tall that can easily devour a goliath whole, and then there are the wondering titans of the land. Massive, 50+ meter long chitinous creatures that are capable of digging through stone with their powerful forelimbs (14 legs in total). What nobody really knows though is that when they eat any living creature, they don't just consume the body, but the soul as well. Holding it in a special crystal organ they have developed, where there are thousands of souls trapped until what is known as "The Red Plague" in ancient texts come to take the souls to the afterlife.
The Hunger, a deity of fangs and dark waters and survival of the fittest. It was part of a group of nature deities known as the Dark Elements, which were created from the shadows of the benevolent aspects of the natural world. Most of them existed in whatever demiplane their benevolent counterpart had created, and were generally not something that most mortals had to worry about (unless one of their priests started causing trouble). Not The Hunger, it resided within the oceans of the Material Plane in the form of a dead-white Colossal+ megalodon that was known to devour ships whole; most sea captains would actually maintain a small shrine to The Hunger in their quarters to pray for safe passage, and sailors would often try and wound some of the monstrous creatures that swam with The Hunger if it came for them in the hope that it would focus on something bleeding instead. A few other details: 1) The Hunger would Awaken some predators that swam with it, meaning that a fair few creatures in its hunting pack were intelligent (and a small number even had some cleric levels as a result of their sentience), 2) it wasn't just a mindless eating machine and was capable of conversation (and, more unnerving, playing with its food), and 3) it was originally just a demigod of predators; when the Dark Element of water came to the Material Plane, The Hunger ate her alive and became an intermediate deity after integrating her portfolio into its own. It's also worth noting that The Hunger was the de facto god worshipped by evil aquatic humanoids, meaning that you would encounter some utterly savage sahuagin tribes or locathah warbands led by a priest of The Hunger. They were not merciful, because nature certainly isn't.
In my setting, it totally depends on who you ask, the comonner in the swamp town, the large frog creatures they deal with daily they call mud broods. The traveler on the road they are most scared of roving feral orc bands, the king of the country, he might be most scared of the rival king. Lore wise it would absolutely be "The One Born of Corruption." Little is known about it and no one can truly tell you much about it other than it exists, and it lives to corrupt. But that setting is over with now, working on a new one while a friend of mine takes over the seat of forever DM, at least for a while.
Look, I'm trying to find a video on this channel that has a story about a campaign taking place in a world where all the gods are dead and the party uses a special artifact to raise a god of the sunrise back to life and start helping him fix stuff and I can't find the video, can yall help me cause I'm starting to think I made the story up
1st edition pathfinder standard will o wisp. First encounter party had with one, they were level appropriate (by CR) and it wrecked the party. Hovering menacingly over fallen PCs feasting on their fear/despair. (As I tried not to wipe the party). The campaign (king maker,) had an island that was infested with them. Level 8 party fled in terror as wisps decloaked and cloaked around them, striking with lightning touch only to fade away again. Several days of hit and run terror attacks on the party, the PCs finally managed to break contact and flee to their city state. Party would flinch at even a hint of floating lights, well into 15th level.
I had one that I didn't have the opportunity to flesh out properly since I wrote myself into a corner. I would like to introduce, The Dusk Death, Jester! The Jester stands roughly around 5'11, but seems to be taller since it's slouched over. Their skin is pale and appears to be rotting. Their figure appears frail and they are lanky with very long limbs. They possess a rusted sword in one hand and in the other have very long claws, but their one defining feature is their cartoonist, unsettling permanent smile that shows their jagged teeth. Now their role was to be a figure of pure fear. Hell, I made a homebrewed ability that captured that. I threw it at my party at level 1 mainly as a set piece and a force that is not to be taken lightly. I described it being surrounded by corpses of those that it has killed while putting emphasis on it's smile and extremely unsettling and terrifying presences. It worked! They were supposed to be a general for the bbeg as well as being the court jester for her as well. They could twist the fears of their foes and get into their heads as well . They were twisted and insane. Their battles were shows and their foes were merely props in its performance. All of this was done to ensure that their Mistress was always smiling.
I'm still in the process of making my DND world, but I have a three for one for this. In the area known as the Green-Back Jungle there's a Huge sized monster simply known as the Emperor of the Jungle, that's stalked the Country wide Jungle for years, slaughtering every traveler and hunting party it's come across yet strangely never bothering with the few towns the various tribes have set up. According to what few reports the tribes have, the beast is near immune to magic and resistant to their weapons, so the only thing to do when the earth starts to shake under it's foot steps is get the hell out of there! The other is in the Fallen-Star Desert the southern most continent in my world, and is a Gargantuan sized Scorpion called the Desert Hunter. This thing unlike it's jungle counterpart is a stealth hunter, and most don't know it's upon them until it's to late, though again it avoided the already established cities. I'm planning to make more giant monsters like this, one for each country with the main similarities being the following: 1; Their shape can't be changed, 2; each has it's own damage resistance including non-Adamantine weapons, 3; their normal attacks count as magical 4; are Huge sized or larger 5; have been around for at least 100 years 6; Each creature MUST have some kind of impact on the country as a whole and not just one small part Finally is my reskin of the Tarrasque which for now has the name 'Megachimerus'. An absolutely ancient beast with the wings of a dragon even though it can't fly and instead uses them to assist in jumps or makes gusts of wind, the tail of a scorpion that concludes in a the head of a giant cobra with the scorpion's stinger as the tongue, has a body reminiscent of a centaur only instead of a horse it's a black panther with the legs looking like those of a crab, the tentacles of a Displacer Beast, the upper torso is that of a silverback gorilla covered in the plates of a pangolin, and finally the head of komodo dragon. Yeah it's a damn beast, that I have no idea if/when I'll use it in a campaign outside a 1 shot but I have it just incase I need it.
My friends setting has these god like entities that are basically new gods but they are very real in the realm and the gods can’t really do anything about them themselves because their power don’t work on them. One of these new gods. Is an ouroboros. For those who don’t know the ouroboros is a mythical snake dragon like creature that is often depicted as being long enough to form a circle by eating its own tail. This being also is told to always reincarnate when it dies. So here’s the kicker the one in my friends campaign is exactly that. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if in the unlikely scenario you do manage to kill it, it comes back stronger and angrier. Now you might think of the idea to seal it somehow. Slight problem it will break out and when it does it will be even more angry at whoever sealed it. Now that wouldn’t be as much of an issue was it not for the fact that they tried it once and the ouroboros has broken out in 1 month. So the next idea might be to use items and weapon that are meant to kill something permanently. But once again the ouroboros just shrug’s it off like everything else. Now there is a way to get rid of the ouroboros the Dm said so themself. They just haven’t found the way to get rid of em yet.
For me, it’s the creature that I try and use in every game, the eyebear, think an owlbear but it’s body is completely covered in eyes of various different shapes and sizes, as well as the eyestalks of an eye tyrant like a spectator or a beholder, fit with the appropriate eye rays
Echidna. Echidna is technically a god due to being born from nothing, Echidna was so powerful that his birth created the primordial monsters, only one of these monsters still remains but some of them have living heirs, Echidna’s death at the hands of an unknown force caused a new biome to be brought into the world, he was also denied passage into the afterlife due to his immortality, his corpse is still immensely powerful after he died, his corpse is currently held in the castle of his son; Raru, who is working to resurrect him
One that I created by accident with a Pokemon Fusion generator is called Kabucruel, and basically answers the question "What if The Kraken (TM) was turned into am eldritch abomination?" You get a horrifying creature that terrorizes the seas and has taken down even the most powerful naval warship that any kingdom has constructed.
Really, any answer I give could end up changing 4 weeks from now, maybe even multiple times. Even then it’s difficult since everything in my world is technically beatable by anyone. RPG XP and stuff is kind of a real phenomenon, and it can allow almost any person to perform impossible act of skill or strength if the situation warrants an enhancement to their natural abilities. If I were to choose something though, it could be one of the ancient creatures, but since almost nobody knows they exist and they aren’t really a direct threat to anyone unless something confronts them, the next things would probably be Abhorrences and Sand Leviathans. I’m going to talk about the former as o think they are more interesting. Abhorrences are massive, black, starfish like creatures who stand at about 2 stories tall. They walk around on land with the use of their 5 thick tentacles/tendrils. Each tentacle has an acid-green eye on the lower portion that possesses exceptional sight, they also have one on the underside of their main body. An Ahorrence is basically a freak of nature that has been blasted full of mana, and so they possess many inexplicable traits. Their blood is highly corrosive, they possess regenerative abilities, supposedly even being able to regenerate a full body from a discarded tentacle if left for long enough, their eyes have the ability to see through magical effects and illusions (so basically just Truesight) and have the ability to petrify creatures, but instead of stone, they cause excessive amounts of a flesh like substance to be produced from the immobilised creature. Their magic nature also allows them to absorb some amount of magic and even twist it (so cast spells). They also have some level of intelligence since to wield magic in my world, a creature must be ‘sentient’ and posses the willpower to do it, meaning that for the most part, only intelligent and semi intelligent species are capable of twisting magic. Abhorrences are fairly rare, you might encounter one one or twice a decade, but when they do show up, their bound to wreak havoc on a fairly substantial area before a person or people strong enough to kill it arrive.
The starbound: The starbound are a race of psychic zombies created by an evil sphinx named Elmyra. They spread like any normal zombie plague, which is scary enough on it’s own. But what takes the starbound to a while nother level the fact that they are a super intelligent hive mind. Elmyra can see and hear through all their senses at once and do advanced tactics and even have her starbound trails cast magic. She is especially fond of psychic damaging spells and screwing with peoples perception and very much likes playing with her food.
The Evil Goose. Famously weak and recently found to be strangely resilient against most dmg on the teams last fight and failed to dmg them. They need to save against its Hateful Aura or feel Frightened. Its stats are abysmal but they are slowly improving as it comes back to life each time it dies. It started at lvl 1 with 1 in each stat, which improved to 2 as it rose at lvl 2 and has a lvl in each of 13 classes all at once. The team managed to skip lvl 3 and 4 fights by trapping the Evil Goose inside a cursed Mirror that would swap someone looking at its reflection with a contested Charisma check from who's inside and Charisma save from who's outside. At lvl 5 it could cast Remove Curse and force extraction from the Mirror but waited until the party engaged in battle to force itself out and attack. It is also a shapesgifting creature but the party have always only found the Goose form. It's supposed to be a fraction from a Hateful Evil God that had to be sealed away inside a Dark Sun. Its real form is a boogey man to even some Gods. It is meant to be a possible final boss. The Goose is slowly regaining parts of its power as it dies and returns in 2d4-1 days. If it reaches lvl 20 and is killed without the party finding a way to its real body and killing it, it will break free and return to the Material realm to wreck havok all across the World. My hope is that the party repairs the relationship between 2 sibling Gods that are borderline opposites and have been at an all-out war since time immemorial and with the blessing of both Gods and their at the time broken builds with top-notch magic items be sent inside the Dark Sun to put a stop to its real form before it destroys the World.
I haven't yet finished or used that setting, but "the spores" - an ancient species that supposedly destroyed the underground dwarven nation underneath the kingdom where my game is set. That kingdom was destroyed and left millenia ago, but still the spores are alive and active as some silver miners found out the hard way after accidentially digging into the infested caves. Since then there is a constant struggle to keep the spores from overrunning the caves and potentially the kingdom or maybe even the entire world. Every living creature infected with spores will eventually lose the ability to think for themselves and instead attack every other living being in sight with the target of spreading the spores even further - similar to a zombie. The only ways of getting rid of the decease is to cut off infected limbs or to use a powerfull and specific healing magic. For strange and unknown reasons there are also the elders. Spore infected warriors and monstrous creatures, who kept their intelligence after being infected. The elders also kept their powers and most of their personality, but serving the spores will take priority over anything from their live before the infection. It is unknown whether or not the elder are having an own personality or are aware of their situation, but in some cases they did recall memories from their past live. There also is a rumour that one of those elders is an ancient white dragon and another one a legendary hero of the kingdom. Also there are stories about adventurers being turned into elders and then leading their friends into traps. Because of the notoriety of the spore several factions have formed around their existence like the starsingers, a religious cult who believes they need to draw powers from the stars to destroy the spores and therefor want to open the caves to expose the spores to starlight or the cavewatch, a special unit founded by the king in order to protect expeditions and in order to keep unprepared adventurers from wandering too far into the caves and being turned into zombies or elders. There is also an organication of scientists who want to do research and a mining company who just want to keep their mines save and running, but I didn't come up with names for those.
right now, for my party...its Saint Nicks evil sister, (also our guild masters sister...yes Santa is his brother) we beat her in a Christmas 1 shot 2 years ago but failed to kill her, and now shes got her hands in everything happening to us. buffing monsters and empowering all manner of creatures. she could face us again but what little we have learned is she is still recovering her strength.
In my setting it would be the ghosts. In my settings there are 3 main types of magic : "Natural" magic : magic engraved in one's dna, which is the reason why dragons have breath weapons for exemple. "Scientific" magic : achieved through study and research, and most spellcasters use this. "Faith" magic : magic that works exclusivly because you believe in it hard enough. Even if your belief is absolutly false, if there are enough people that thinks that there is a guardian spirit in the sea for enough time, one might begin to exist. It is unusual and generaly weak, since most of the time it's an actual god blessing you, so the complicated spellcraft is handled by a being of far superior power and intellect. So Will in itself has an influence on the universe, so what makes the ghosts specials? They are are single will so powerful they are they own source of magic, someone that wanted to live so bad their mind took form despite being cut from the magic of their body. Sending your mind elsewhere is fine as long as you have the magic energy and knowledge to do so, but this is closer to the creation of the first gods than anything else. After all why the first gods exists? The main theory is that their will was enough to create them from nothing, since even them only know that one day their just started to exist in a physical body. And since the main power of a ghost is it's will, it's one of the sole creature that cannot be destroyed by using a superior amount of power, their sole weakness being that they are souls. And only some gods, chosen ones and mystic being have the capacity to directly target the soul. So if one appears, we're all really screwed, cause bullets fireballs and swords won't do much, and if it wants to kill us, it will outlast everyone on the battlefield. Oh, and most of the ghosts turn crazy really fast.
Probably the Zombie T-Rex we faced during the first few months of our current campaign, and my character is a centaur paladin so you can figure out I was scared for my character life
I have one. It's a creature that looks like an old man in green raggy robes, no shoes, curly white hair, and a gnarled shillelagh in hand. No one who has survived him has ever seen what he actually looks like because locking eyes with him will transport you to his realm, which is a foggy forest filled with deadly animated trees, roots, vines, and wood-carved forest animals. He is a legend in our world who has a reputation for whisking away people are caught off the beaten path of his forests. You know he's coming when the forest goes quiet, and you feel a silent wind tugging at your clothes. You can hear him knocking his shillelagh on the tree trunks as he approaches. With every knock, you must pass a wisdom check to avoid looking at him. When the sounds of the forest resume, he has departed, and you are safe.
The serpent of the ice floes. She has the heart pearls of 3 other true dragons to fuel her power. She scours the realm for power in order to rule the cycle of life and death. Her main avatar is a Colossal serpent that can rival the tarrasque in size when coiled up.
In my Radiant Citadel campaignn, it's the Primal Forces. tl:dr, my party wanted a myth arc, so I gave them a myth arc. The Primal forces are four Elder Elementals, Ifreann the Phoenix, Scoilte the Zaratan, Caolaigh the Leviathan, and Stoirm the Elder Tempest. Thousands of years ago, the four were summoned and ravaged the Radiant Citadel and its kingdoms so severely, it was the end of the Citadel and everyone who knows of them is terrified at the mere thought of them escaping their prison. Each of the four is both sapient and actively malevolent, and each being a living extinction event and potential planetary apocalypse on their own. Of course, now an evil cult is attempting to set them free to ravage the multiverse, and everyone is rather frightened of that happening.
There's a rationalization I've got of the Outer Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos; they are entities born of the psychic fear of the unknown, and are thus symbolically tied to that fear. Thus, they can be killed by giving lie to their existence by showing that the unknown is MEANT to be understood and defeated eventually; in other words, a physical representation of the mono-myth... Which is to say in the setting I'm workshopping, anything resembling the Great Old Ones or Outer Gods are dead, and their remains are in a place "deeper" than the "lower planes"; what's really scary, is the question of what kind of things a person must have witnessed that even very concept of "the unknowable" cannot find anything to clutch onto in his heart and mind whatsoever. ... people's imagination of what kind of person they were has spawned a different kind of eldritch horror, "the watchers of eternity", creatures that merely being able to confirm their existence causes people to lose faith in the unknown being truly unknown, and become unable to lie or keep a secret without becoming sickened, have this consistent sense that they are being watched, and whenever they find out there's something they don't know they become obsessed with finding the answer in the belief its impossible that "nobody knows" to the point one has to physically drag them away from this pursuit. Those who see them in person? They get the immediate impression that not only do the "Watchers" know exactly every way they could deal with them, and that they are perfectly capable of doing every single of of those ways; if such a person so much as believes they have drawn the Watcher's ire, they instinctually curl up into the fetal position and start begging for their life (or whatever they value more than their lives) up until it crosses their mind that if the watchers wanted to take their life or whatever from them they would already have done so.
In my universe there is a giant holy beast created by eldritch beings that was so strong the most powerful being in the multiverse had to take it down. It was a rogue creature, that destroyed a civilization before being finally defeated. It’s damage output is quadrupled against undead and it can gain immunity to effects and damage it is subjugated to. Ran an entire campaign about killing the thing
The most terrifying creature I can think of is The Clown from Space Station 13. These entities are always found meddling or causing the most dire of emergencies. I have seen clowns invent electric guillotines, invade a xenomorph nest to throw plants and chairs at the queen, and even leverage open a person's chest with a crowbar to provide "lung extensions."
I like the weeping angels. They come off as a combination of the Doctor Who ones and the Witches from Left 4 Dead with a little venus flytrap in the mix.
In my group of friends we have the most horrible and fearsome creature ever, that is found across all these universes and dimensions... The CURSO! It's an Owlbear, but with a pun in Portuguese as its name, Coruja = Owl and Urso = Bear. Curso = Course.
The Sun. In one of my campaigns, planets are based on a planetary beast which shapes the planet it inhabits. Stars also have one of these beast and the Sun believes its a god and wish to devour any planets that it can get its hands on. This process is being delayed by one person, who is stationed by the Sun to make sure its in check.
In one of my settings, there is a species of jellyfish known as the Festering Jellies that floats in massive swarms through the skies, like living air balloons. They spread a psionic field of energy that infects sentient creatures with a psionic virus that makes them want to go out and stand over the open sky as the jellyfish swarm floats over them. The Festering Jellies will stretch out a mass of bluish-purple tendrils with hooks and grab hold of the sentient before dragging their unresponsive body up into the swarm where their bodies are not eaten. Instead, they are kept alive within the swarm which keeps these poor souls alive with nutrients fed to them through the tendrils while they are kept docile by the swarm's psionic powers, used as living incubators for the swarm's eggs. Those few who have survived the experience have either committed suicide or been driven insane. And those few who have survived the experience are not safe even afterward. Their bodies are infected with the Festering Jellies' eggs and after they die these minuscule eggs, around the size of a fish egg, will hatch and the small jelly larva will devour the corpse before burrow to the closest surface so they can psionically float away and start a fresh new swarm. There is a near-constant war against the Festering Jellies with specific fleets of airships, specialized spell casters, and even guilds of hunters dedicated to eradicating them. But the swarms persist even after losing more than eight of their number as they can reproduce rapidly. The biggest thing that makes the Festering Jellies so frightening to the people of this world is the fact that scholars have determined that these jellyfish do not need to use sentients as incubators. They just chose to. They were told this by one o those swarms when attempting to communicate with it. "We do not need to reproduce with thinkers. We just chose to." Not because they want to, not because they need to, not because they enjoy to, not because they are told to, not because they have to. But because they just chose to. And that. That is terrifying.
My setting is more or less full of these, but I’ll do one of the more fun ones. Puppet crawlers are a species of centipede that reach lengths of between 6-12 feet long. They’re also capable of generating powerful electrical shocks, commonly used to paralyze prey. If that weren’t bad enough, these baddies are parasitic. When the adults aren’t particularly hungry, they treat their prey very differently. Each adult’s face is equipped with an ovipositor that injects eggs directly into the victim’s throat. These eggs hatch within minutes, and the resulting swarm of young rapidly devour their new host’s internals. It gets worse. After turning their new host into a bag of skin and bones, the larval centipedes will twist around its bones and align themselves into something akin to a muscle structure. It isn’t uncommon to see these puppets shambling around outside humanoid settlements, and they should never be approached for a few reasons. Firstly, they smell. Secondly, those babies are growing. As young Puppet Crawlers mature, they grow quite rapidly. In order to remain protected from predators and sunlight, they must gain additional cover. If another humanoid gets too close to a puppet, the fiend will violently attack them and vomit centipedes from its mouth and eye-sockets. From there, the process repeats itself, and now the first batch has split itself neatly in two. This process continues until each swarm is left with too few Crawlers to adequately manipulate their puppets, at which point the now fully grown invertebrates burst out to find a host and begin the cycle anew. If left unchecked, Puppet Crawler populations can explode almost overnight. They are to be killed on sight at all costs. Additionally, rumors persist that swarms of adults are capable of puppeteering corpses as well, even creatures as large as dead dragons.
so far this campaign, it's a three way tie between a young red dragon tossing Pyrotechnics, from which my party ran away twice, a Magma Dragon, because the party saw her basically one-shot the rogue for touching her hoard, and regular low level skeleton wizards spamming Magic Missile. everyone but one person in the party hid from them like babies, leading to that one person getting all 120 damage worth of Magic Missiles that round.
Mine is the BBEG of my first campaign: The Engineer. Once an ambitious young innventor, a plan created by the God of fate(which has been demoted to God of death by their own child) to restore themselves to their former power unleashed a demon on the mortal, futuristic world. The inventor created a drug that increased the best aspects of ones self, whether it be increased physical strength, intelligence or even magical prowess. The demon, corrupted the drug and made all of those who used it into a mindless, zombielike slave in order to gain enough forces to find the magical bracelets which currently process the God of Kate's powers.The inventor once got into battle with the demon himself, using his innate ability to control all metals to his advantage, but the demon ultimately came out on top. While not dead, the inventor now processed a ticking time bomb, which would corrupt his mind into fulfilling out the God of Kate's notices by any means nessacary. If the things go to plan in the prequel oneshot that is set in the same world, this would set up the backstory for the BBEG in my 1st campaign. The Engineer is what remains after the inventors' consciousness has been removed, and is a cruel, sadistic, and maniacal being the has conquered much of the in-game world. His ability to control all metals has made even the most powerful technology useless, and would eventually come back from death ad a living virus, which can also control all screens and computer programs. One example of The Engineer's treachery is the time when he forced one of the player characters to kill one of their friendly npcs to escape from being captured, and after they chose to shoot the npc(who was actually a friendly ghost, and leader of the resistance against The Engineer), he just killed the other npc just for the fun of it. Other atrocities include fusing human DNA with that of animals, putting Bombs in the brains of all of his soldiers, which can be remote denotated at any time for any reason, and ATOMIZING AN ENTIRE CITY. This villain was at first made by because I felt my friends dnd villains didn't have enough presence within the narrative, and I think I delivered with this one.
The Black Omit. Born as a universe collapses in on itself, they are both a blessing, and a curse. Six legs, and a body darker than the abyss itsels, with a long tail eith a three fingered hand, curled into a ball, at its tip. Gills line its neck, allowing it to sense heat, and tendrils reside in the portsl in its mouth, ready to draw in prey. A being with an insatiable appetite, and the ability to hop dimensions, these oddly lizardlike creatures seek to do only one thing. Fill their internal worlds. The Omit, in truth, is formed around a planetoid. The last planetoid of its universe. With an artificial sun, and a rudementary inteligence that griws over their eternal life, Omits seek to fill their worlds with life, and watch them, like a human watches a terarrium. To fill it, they will find cretures they find interesting, or particularly tasty, and devoir them whole, sending them to their internal plane to live out their lives. Some people tell of worlds, galaxies, and even universes developing in the oldest of these beings, but being almost impossible to leave. Only shofting to another plane MIGHT let one escape, but all those who know that soell leave too soon to teach it to others.
In my old world, it would have to have been the Styx Hunter. Some two hundred years before the events of my second campaign, legends began to spread of a beast that lurked in the outer realms. It would roam the River Styx, hunting demon and devil alike. It was wildly effective, capable of taking down pit fiends on its own. All evidence found it hunted with a bow and sword. All demons and devils interigated for information would find large chunks of the memory missing, leading to the possibility that it stole memory from its prey. these tales would flow into the warlocks of these fiends on the Material Plane. Some see these stories as terrifing because this creature can hunt, kill, and scare the souls of the damned. But, as well, some see it as a rightous soul, speculating it to be a fallen angel seeking redemption, a lost soul out for revenge, or the manefestation of the River Styx itself. The truth is more tragic. Before it was the Styx Hunter, he was a simple dragonborn named Torend. He was played by one of my players at the time, and had the goal to be the greatest hunter in the world. Early into his journey, he would partner with a group of people that would go onto become legends. Among those people, he found the love of his life, his girlfriend's character. Sadly, she was decended from giants, meaning they were unlikely at best to produce children. Over their journey, she would eventually make a deal with Asmodeus to be freed from her previous patron. This group would grow to known as the Exemplars. Then, one the eve one of their most told battles, Torend watched his love vanish in from of his eyes. Takeing his leave, he sought to find her. Knowing her patron, he found a portal to the Nine Hells, and began his hunt. Not long into it, he was forced into a retreat back into the top layer of Limbo (it and Avernus are one in the same at this time). Here, he was forced back too far, and fell into the River Styx. Nomraly, this would shred a mortal soul to its basest components, rip memories away, and reforge them into larvae. Torend managed to hold onto one shred of his past life as he drowned though. It does not know what it is. Who it was. Or where it is. All it knows is it must find someone. But who? Where is she? How does it know its a she? Who was she to him? Was it a he? It can't remember. It can barley speak, only mimicing the words its prey have said to it. Certain sounds ring bells to it. Hells. Devil. Hunter. Giant. Asmodeus. That last one almost forms something. A memory? What are memories? It doesn't matter. It must find its prey. For that is all it has to be. Why else does it hunt? As to what this monster looks like, it is a medium sized fiend that looks a lot like a bipedal water skink in its shape. It has two eyes on the sides of its head. Both pitch black in color. Its scales are an unheathy light grey, almost like volcanic ash or dust. It makes no noise as it prowls the land, almost as if it has forgotten sound as well as its past life. Its left arm has two black bone like growths that form a bow shape. Connecting these two growths is a thread of silver wire. When it is pulled back, it creates an arrow of solid ice. This arrow is made from the waters of River Styx. It prefers to kill from a distance. but, in some rare cases, it will get close, and try to kill you with a blade it keep sheathed in a growth on its right leg. This blade has a handel and pommel made of bone form an unknown source. The blade itself is steel as black as night, and cold as ice. It is belived this sword was forged from a glacier the flowed along the river. Regardless, if amortal is killed by either of these weapons, their soul is shreded like tissue paper flushed down a toilet, while more importal beings leave missing memories, and sometimes may even forget what they are entirely. Not even crossing the river saves you,as it is capable of swimming in the water with no downsides. Thankfully to most mortals, it largely ignore non fiends that wind up near its territory. but, sometimes, it may choose to hunt you down. Think like a mix between Predator and Alien Isolation. It never goes to far away from the river, but if you ever wind up down here, justified or not, then be warned, the hunter is always near.
Modified the Nightwalker and dialed it up to 40k. Basically now they can double as doppelgängers for creatures they replace and consume, increasing their total health by the max hp of the creature consumed along with the form skills memories and abilities that come with it. Oh and they are much more intelligent and able to resist necromantic control. Oh yeah and they can push people into the negative plane to summon more of them. This occurred as a result of a campaign where the essences of life and death as concepts were starting to weaken and disappear and so something needed to be done to shock the cycle of life and death back into functioning properly. As a result awakening Nightwalkers became a thing and once they gained proper intelligence they quickly figured out these other abilities that they innately had but just didn’t have the intelligence to use before. Now they’re much more cunning and a far bigger threat to the world at large infiltrating positions of power to create horrible systems to drain the will to live from everything around while summoning more of their kind to invade. Needless to say my players get very on edge any time they have to deal with unknown necromantic magic so they don’t open a portal to the negative plane.
Being that I'm running a Transformers TTRPG campaign, there's not really anything more frightening in that universe than the Chaos-Bringer himself, Unicron. For those who don't know, he's God of Evil in the Transformers mythos. He and his brother Primus have been warring since time immemorial. Unicron consumed worlds to increase his power so he could defeat Primus, but Primus created the original Thirteen Primes, the first Cybertronians, before becoming Cybertron itself. The Primes defeated Unicron and cast him out, where he's slumbered ever since. His blood, Dark Energon, can reanimate the dead as zombies under his control. In my campaign, he's going to resurrect the villains the party kills as his generals, which the party must defeat before they can battle Unicron. But the longer they take, Unicron will consume the Cybertronian colony worlds, killing millions including named NPCs, and become stronger. I'm also gearing up for a Star Wars Force and Destiny campaign, and there it's easily the Star Weirds. These apparitions attack Force Wielders during Hyperspace travel, and there's nothing you can do to fight them off.
The Upended They're "invincible" creatures who can only be "killed" by using the Remove Curse spell or by running away. They hate being sensed and once detected, they hunt creatures and tear them to ribbons. You can't mercy kill a creature caught by the Upended either, they can only die when an Upended chooses.
I run a Terrairia calamity mod inspired campaign so… yeah. But the most feared creature (not calamitas or Yharim) is tied between Yharon, Jungle dragon of rebirth, or the Devourer of Gods
The Ancient Darkness, known also as the Void. So feared is the void that even lesser powers are willing to form a ceasefire just to put this force back to sleep before it wipes out all existence. So feared is the void that the knowledge of this ultimate destructive force has been purged from most lexicons and memories, ensuring that the Ancient Darkness cannot be woken by the reckless few. Yet even in sleep, the void extends its reach and entices its pawns to bring about the end of all things.
The demo king mordao he once ruled the realm but three heroes slayed him. But he did not die only locked away till the time is right and that time is here
I have what i call the daughters of Azharul they are the result of a group of adventureres several thousand years ago within my setting managing to break Tiamat who was summoned to the material plane with the aid of part of Tiamat semi rebelling agains the main mind, When i say break Tiamat i actively mean splitting her into pieces thanks to the heads fighting over who is in control. The daughters are each mid god level entities that wonder the material plane. They are revered as gods, have cults dedicated to each of them as Tiamat is long forgotten. Most terrifying factor? Their divine magic with the ability to pull on Tiamats' original power at a small risk of losing what humanity they have developed over the several thousands of years being around.
Well there's two and both are homebrewish. See my players wanted a survival compaign so each section of jungle I made has a random encounter table. But I threw in a few basic homebrew creatures to throw the unexpected at them. The first is an unnamed monster but for now we'll call it Gliscor, why? Because I basically made them a bat with a scorprion tail and all it literally is, is a bat stat block with the sting ability from a scorpion stat block. My players encountered it in our first session and when I described it I go "You know the pokemon Gliscor." "Oh yeah that's my favorite." "Oh well probably not anymore as you see this thing lunged at your head with its stinger." Next is Fireflies. I know what you're thinking. What's so scary about fireflies? Well they're not so much flies as they are reskinned Gold Dragon Wyrmlings because I didn't want to have dragons as wild monsters. Otherwise mechanically they are the same. I still haven't given them a quest to catch fireflies but it's only a matter of time.
Chormatic and Metalic Dragons. In my Eberron I did away with their usual rivalries and made them a unified civilization, which is as if not more advanced than our modern civilization, instead their limiting factor is that they can only have so many of thier kind outside of their home continent else he Demon Lord Tiamat will awake and kill and/or enslave all of them. What makes them more terrifying is that whenever they go abroad they never go alone, any dragon older than an adult will always have 4 Half Dragon Sorcerers, 8 Dragonborn Warriors, and 16 kobold rouges, all LvL 20, that act as their entourage. Why are they so OP? Well Dragons are capable of learning and casting 10th, 11th, and 12th level Spells, and their entourage act as both the Dragons bodyguards *and* their prison guards.
Probably a hateful Lich because they make other undead. Imagine your toddler getting turned into a skeleton, and imagine the rest becoming another type of undead called a Skrelch(inverse skeleton named off sound it makes moving).
"The Prince of the Forest" It looks and acts as a child , it wears a simple wood mask , flower crown , dark crimson cloak , average low born clother and is barefoot ; it appears at anytime on the central woodlands (massive mix of forest , mire and bog the size of a country) were historically a lot of ancient kingdoms used to exist , he is very curious and harmless enough if it chooses to aproach you , people say you only have to present him with a toy , candy or similar to get him to talk or leave you alone , if you dont it will get angry and before you know it you are sorrounded by a dozen child size figures wearing animal masks and rudimentary weapons , other times are werebeasts , chimeras , wood knights , the stories changes from place to place ; stories about it go back many many generations , common folk fear it because just like a child it is unpredictable and is as likely to guide you to trasure as it is to get you kill , he only attack older kids (teens) and adults , while protecting kids from danger , so this cause a lot of trouble for people because children lean no to fear the dangers of the forest "The Princess of the Forest" Some tales say she is the older sister of the prince , others that his mother , other that she is the spirit of the forest keeping the prince from growing stronger ; she looks like a young beautiful maiden with a white folk dress and a crown of flowers and feathers , nobody recalls anything specific of her looks save for her otherworldy beauty ; if find with the prince you should not be afriad and should leave them alone , the problem is when she is alone , tales say she entice young man and woman alike , you can appease her with a gift , problem is that unlike the prince , nobody knows what to give her , from jewelry to blood has been quoted by survivors , other say they she even accepts intangible gifts such as their first kiss , a song , knowledge and even their love , if you fail to give something or if rejected you find yourself attacked by the forest itself ; unlike the prince she is more matured and can be properly spoken , some even say they convince her to let them go without giving her a gift ; she can appear before anyone but is most commonly seen by young men and woman , she also protects children and couples in love while in the forest "Cinder Archons" Ancient Heroes that consume the souls of dragons during the Age of Dragons , they were betrayed by their allies and the gods themselves (diferent set than the current ones) because they had grown to powerful and were sealed on deep tombs because they could no be killed , then they were erased from history as part of a spell to diminish their power , all knowledge of them was passed thru clergy and noble families , but for many year recently tales of them have resurface among the common folk and stories about their apocaliptic return are growing "Cinder Knights" The lieutenants of the Cinder Archons , all dragonborn and former slaves of dragons during their time , each carrying the undiying flame of original dragons (original dragons used raw magic breath and could use all elements) that can reduce any mortal being into ash with a single touch and consume their soul trapping them in endless torment inside them , recently a lot of tales about sightings have been spreading among the commonfolk
The Chess Set nothing sets my players in serious mode than when they are involved. Pawns Bishops Rooks The Queen The pawns are individuals who have been expiramented on and have had metals and weapons grafted on them. Created by taking a person killing them grafting the weapons on them then reviving them again. Assaulting them with necromancy til they are killed and rezzed again then rezzed once more tp be subservient minions. They have magic packed inside them so when they are killed nobody can replicate them and harm anyone near them. The Bishops are Cleric, Paladins and Druids grafted together and travel in pairs one in an attack stance the other in a defensive one. They have access to spell casting and can command the pawns. The Rooks are individuals who have had more extensive surgeries. They are large and deadly defenders of key areas. Typically they are created in pairs and each pair has its own unique trait. The best way to think of them is Mr X from Resident Evil. The Queen is a being created from grafted dragons and acts as the key protector of the king. The queen is also capable of all types of movement so running from it is very difficult. The King is the Creator of the set. Anyone can become the king but the knowledge is held by 2 individuals and one of them has recently been defeated and sealed away. But like all BBEGs he will be back.
The Daevan Lords, and their Servants. The Daevan themselves aren’t creatures so much as they are demi-deities, and I can’t quite count them as creatures, but their servants are something you never want to run into. Specifically the servants of Pazul-Bahgoula, the Beldahm. The Beldahm rarely ever kill, and are almost never seen, so what makes them so tariffing? Pazul is known as the queen of dread. The keeper, and in some cases the protector. She preserves innocence at any cost, and will answer the desperate cries of children. If a child is suffering, the Queen will send her Beldahm, who relentlessly pursue the children of the region, to try an preserve them. Regardless of weather or not they are the same child that called them. Adults don’t see them, mistaking them for Trees, dark corners, or shadows. But they always see the effects. The children they target almost always become sick, and delirious loosing more and more if themselves, slowly wanting to get closer to the Beldahm. The parents will try their hardest to keep the children from going into the woods, but it almost always fails, and when the Beldahm takes the child by the hand, they walk to the nearest body of water, and both walk in. The child is taken to Pazul and never seen again.
I created a homebrew final boss for Hoard of the Dragons follow up to the Rise of Tiamat. Lahamu, Daughter of Tiamat. She is once a Red Dragon during the great War between Tiamat and Bahamut based on the difference to their ideals. She has witnessed Tiamat's defeat and was sent to Avernus she retaliate to her uncle and was sadly killed. In time her corpse decay but soon her heart made flesh was preserve from utter resentment to Bahamut causing to crystallized it and begins to accend into a new draconic being. Unholy Greatwyrm. A death dragon to be specific. Her flesh have been revitalize into a Chromatic Umbral color with her eyes changed from pure orange into a necrotic purple. She vowed to find and killed Bahamut but she has been dead for some time that the world changed. She sees humans Elves, Dwarf etc. Live together. She may be once a Red Dragon and now a newly sub species of a dragon. She still have a calm mind and more tactical method. She Polymorph herself into a Elf like Dragonic Bloodline Sorcerer to live in secret to learn the new world. In time She understood the world, lore, and legends from Tiamat and Bahamut she decided to find a way to free her mother, but to do that she needs allies. During within decades, to centuries she gained allies to the point her preaching of why the world is wrong and only the Dragons are the true rulers. She even gain faithful allies that they are assign generals of each of the roles and bless of draconic ability and Tiamat's blessings. Moral of the story I change the scenario that the cultists are attacking small towns, taking treasures, prisoners or even new allies. To be added to the ranks. While prisoners are being held experiments to turn them into draconic hybrids as a personal dragon army to destroy Faerune and become the new ruler of the realm under her mother's name. I had a team go through a 30 floor tower on the season finale. 4 months it took them to make it all the way to the top despite they are locked out of long rest, cause they at a time limit to reach before they reach the Well of the Dragons. Her fight at the top last almost a total of 20 Hours. The dice gods bless them with Nat 20s to avoid or survived her attacks. The guys were mentally tired after seeing their dices rolls. Now they are at season 2 and I'm just getting started what the Cultists are planning
Shadeurn, The Eldritch being that is older than the gods of Surrath. He betrayed his own kind to secure his safety in a war between the two parties. He was trapped inside the moon for eternity and only a gods clashing will begin setting him free. When one of my players were born, he was a demigod. His birth started a small conflict between the gods that begun Shadeurns return. As the creator of darkness and death he is slowly draining the life of the moon goddess as he grows stronger. He is slowly destroying the astral plane and the once he breaks out he will cause the moon to fall on to the planet wiping out the world.
The Night Ainok. They're a race of wolf-like people who stick to the shadows, only visiting cities to restock on weapons and armor... or slaughter individuals who defy their deities. Their main god is the Raven Queen, goddess of the balance of Life and Death, as well as memory. They also revere a few nature gods. Their elusive nature has earned them a fearful reputation among human cities, and an even worse reputation among High Elves. Once upon a time, High Elves marched across the land with their war-beasts and dragons, slaughtering and enslaving all in their wake. They were stopped by the Dwarves, Lizardfolk, and Wood Elves. However, the Ainok were their worst enemies. The Ainok had a reputation for not just killing High Elves in the night, but leaving nothing behind but charred bones, some cracked open with the marrow sucked out. Even dragons were eaten by the Ainok. Fierce survivalists as they are, they believe meat of the defilers of nature shouldn't go to waste. The Ainok were also the reason Mind Flayers fled the plane. The Ainok view the Elder Brains' dominion over memory an affront to their goddess, and use their magic to protect their minds and track down Mind Flayer colonies. With both Ainok and Gith hunting them, the Mind Flayers simply could not remain on this world. It also doesn't help that the Ainok's closest allies are the Firbolgs, the race whose war magic was so strong that they toppled the ancient empire of Giants. The Ainok are mostly based off the Magic: the Gathering Ainok from Tarkir, with a little recoloring and lore to fit the world.
Bears. Regular bears.
Whenever they turn up, they end up rolling ridiculously well.
They've killed player characters almost every time.
I have no idea why, but bears are now more feared than dragons.
That’s honestly hilarious, make *super bears* but don’t change any of the stats, keep it all the same but make it sound more terrifying.
Question: Runebears or Dire bears?
@@MasterZebulin brown bears the first two times.
@@Lowehart hear me out
a polar bear being the BBEG
If you're the DM, make bears a sentient tribe that worships a group of gods known as "The Dice Gods".
How else do they roll so damn well?
I especially LOVED the monsters that were common-ish, cause of course the most widely feared monsters are the ones that your town will encounter semi-regularly. Sure, world-eating dragons are scary but if you’ve seen a giant axalotle destroy ships in your harbour several times, then you’re gonna have nightmares about them for life
PANR has tuned in.
The most famously terrifying creature? In my setting? That's tough to say...
In my case, there's this creatures we call "Black Watchers" They are some failed experiments from a being able to manipulate shadows. They are tall, humanoid slim figures with no face and 7 eyes floating around their head. They are incredibly swift and hard to detect, and the only way to kill one is destroying all 7 eyes, at which point the creature will blow up in a shadow blast. Problem is, if one of this things sees you, your main issue is going to be the 8 foot tall shadow person running towards you at max speed, plus the others it will have alerted.
Let me tell you, people. you put one or two of these in a forest at night, or some castle ruins, and your party will have a BAD time.
When I ran my Eberron campaign, I used Living Spells as bosses fairly often. One of the first ones I introduced was a Living Stinking Cloud. The party was on their way to clean up some yuan-ti, but they found them all dead... of poison damage? They didn't know it then, but the Living Stinking Cloud had been sent to slay the yuan-ti as a test run of its abilities. The main villain was capable of making and controlling Living Spells, and one of the enhancements he'd given to them was to ignore Resistance to whatever damage type the Living Spell dealt, but to also deal half damage to creatures with Immunitity to a damage type. It, of course, was immune to Poison and the yuan-ti tend to rely heavily on that, so it was terrifying for the party to see their recurring enemies poisoned. When they fought it, it started making little gas pockets that grew larger each round. They had to deal with it pronto, but the party leader was a paladin who smote it just quickly enough to keep things from getting really out of hand. Every Living Spell encounter after that was always a big deal.
I got some silly yet very dangerous creatures.
Ameowlgams are cat-like experiments gone rogue, able to mimic both the living and non-living.
The only way they can grow bigger is if they combine with another ameowlgam. They can change form at will, often times using this to traverse hostile areas.
If there is a big enough ameowlgam they can even try to mimic one’s fighting style.
They are sometimes kept as pets, being similar to perhaps a mix of a slime and a cat.
They occasionally try to get cat-like beings to mix in, but will not force them to join. Some people even use them as artificial limbs in exchange for safety or food
Among the scariest well-known creatures in my setting have to be the extremely rare mutation of Chromatic Dragon known as "Royal Dragons". While physiologically, they match their parents in every regard, the distinctive trait of a Royal Dragon is exceptional psychic power - primarily the ability to mentally dominate other creatures, even other dragons, and hold thousands of individuals in thrall. These powers often make them power-hungry, primarily of a political sort.
No fewer than four entire city-states have been secretly formed by a Royal Dragon in recorded history, only falling when something caused their psionic hold on their people to break or the dragon was discovered and slain. It's for this reason that many nations now have multiple safeguards in place to ensure someone taking the helm of a country isn't actually a Royal Dragon in disguise.
Luckily, Royal Dragons are so exceedingly rare thanks to their own kind, with most being slain shortly after hatching. The parents themselves will often notice the signs of one of their hatchlings being a Royal Dragon when it has enthralled its broodmates, who serve its every whim, and then kill it to avoid the risk of their own child attempting to (and potentially succeeding in) psionically dominate them.
Still, the threat posed by these dragons is so great that the ruling class of most nations have entire stories using Royal Dragons as an allegory for one lesson or another - as while none have managed to found a proper nation for one reason or another, none of them want to risk theirs falling into the hands of a power-hungry psychic lizard bent on enslaving their minds.
I like the idea of dragons that use mind control powers to control cities like governments with propaganda.
In my setting, I've supercharged the Leviathans, as I thought it would be an interesting lore tidbit.
Leviathans are few, but mighty, capable of unleashing worldwide devastation if provoked. Sailing is a rarity, save for those brave (or foolish) enough to do so. While most are docile, when one sets their sights on a passing ship, those aboard should say their prayers.
Once, there was a kingdom that declared war on a Leviathan that wandered too close to their shores. Naturally, this ended how you might expect: with the entire country nuked from existence, forever unable to sustain life. All avoid the region out of fear of never returning.
The scariest part? Someone recently defeated a Levaiathan single-handedly, and this person is the BBEG.
They may take any form. Appearing almost anywhere or when. Bringing ruin, war or simply showering gold throughout the realms. Yes, they are the most terrifying, unpredictable of all things. These are the Player Characters.
The Nightmarechild
A being from beyond the known realms, is mere appearance causing two realms to collide into each other, creating a new one. It proceeded to feed on this realm, starting from the top, as it killed the gods of both former realms. I’d armies unstoppable, it’s presence uncomprehendable, through rash means civilization managed to barely survive and 100 years later it seems to have vanished, yet it’s presence is still felt in every corner of the world.
In my campaign it’s a water genasi assassin named Mudlow (Genasis work a bit different in my campaign like for example they can turn into their element temporarily) he can be hired by anyone who knows him and people that know how to reach him. He goes after anyone and kills even his contract givers if they do not believe in his ideals or are overall just bad people in his view.
My old DM, Laird, came up with a few. A couple that I still remember.
Ogrillith: A cross between a common ogre, and a merilith (six armed demon with a snake's body where her legs should be). The result, a six armed ogre who is faster, smarter, and tougher than regular ogres. They're also immune to weapons that aren't at least of +1 enchantment.
Cyri-Hydra (aka a Hydralisk): A cross between a basilisk and a hydra. Originally created by priests and wizards devoted to Cyric, God of Murder, they were initially called the Cyri-Hydra. When they began breeding true and spreading across The Realms, others started calling them hydralisks. Physically, they pretty much look like eight legged hydras, with three to eight heads (1d6+2). The heads have a petrifying gaze attack, which is far more difficult to avoid because of the multiple heads. Its also immune to weapons that are not at least of +1 enchantment. The creature's eyesight is even worse than that of the basilisk, bordering on complete blindness, so the likelihood of it accidentally petrifying itself is practically none. It does, however, have extremely keen hearing and sense of smell, nearly equal to that of a grimlock. One beneficial thing about this monster is that if an ordinary item is completely covered in its blood, there is a 5% chance (96 to 100 on percentile dice) of it spontaneously becoming enchanted. This makes their blood very valuable to enchanters.
The Terrapede.
A 125 meter long monstrosity, distantly related to the purple worm.
oh, I totally forgot about my homebrewed demon creatures:
based on the bugs in Mimic, they were kidnapping people and objects with magic, and the party was tasked with looking into several disappearances.
they could swift action teleport, fly, react to magic being cast, absorb it, and learn to cast it right back. plus, hitting a spellcaster allowed them to steal a random highest level spell they knew and that level slot.
they were draining people and items to power portals to bring more onto this plane. thw casters were running scared, but the creatures could teleport right to them, or fly to them, strike, and teleport away. good times.
I once went with a limited omniscient being. Essentially, when it hears its proper name spoken aloud anywhere on the plane it’s currently located, it instantly knows your exact location. For a duration of 1 minute, it knows the speakers exact locale and can choose to teleport to you. If it chooses to show up (which it often does), it kills the speaker (or all those in the immediate vicinity), and teleports away with the corpse(s).
Giving your players the name of that creature (essentially giving them all a TPK button), creates more story-hooks, and moral dilemmas than I ever thought I would see at a table.
Mine is something simply enough called a "Pursuing Silhouette", its mostly seen as "Just a myth" but thats because most people who have been hunted by it didnt live long enough to gain evidence of its existance ( Or if they did it wasnt believed ). It looks like a humanoid "shadow" ( Its not really a shadow ) that slowly walks towards its victim until either it can get in melee range, or they try to attack it at range where it will then attack. Instead of dealing any normal damage type, it deals what i call "Errasure" which not only deals damage you cant reduce but also has a permanent max HP reduction equal to half what is erased. Il say aswell, even those who have crossed planes to attempt to escape it have still fallen after 3 days.
5e Adaptation of the Odopi and the Kurobozu, thanks to "Dungeon Dad", those added to my Arcane Devourer (an eldritch doglike creature that feeds on arcane energy... or spell slots). With some Slow dark narration that ends up in tension, noises and the sudden noise that my players recognize as the "ho no, please dont be X monster", had make my tables enjoy and fear the encounters. and avoid certain places in the map.
Hmm, depends on the perspective. From an in universe perspective, probably Star Wraiths, astral hunters that eat hunters and people within spacefaring vessels alike. While most star wraiths are smaller and don’t pose a threat to a lightly armed ship, those such as the dragon feeder star wraith and lurker star wraith can lead even battleships to ruin. The scariest part is that they are near undetectable except by all but the best eyes while traveling through space, as their coating mimics star patterns.
From the players perspective it is some oozes that they rolled really bad against in combat.
They are both homebrew and the oozes were a star wraith minion so it still works out in the wraiths favor in fear factor.
In my world lore there is Atamotsoretued (Deuterostomata reversed).
She looks like a gargantuan size sea lily (crinoid), so nothing too terrifying.
The thing that made her so scary is that I created this entity to help a friend who was scared or disgusted by crinoids and I introduced her by describing a scene in which my friend's character gets abducted and his blood sucked by the giant entity to use biomancy.
That biomancy was used to generate a small version of herself, called Bibi by my friend , which helps the party (they were also scared of Bibi at the beginning).
As a result, now the players like crinoids because the two characters are actually nice.
The scariest thing I put in my setting is the simply called "The Hungry Darkness". It's a ooze-like creature from a plane of darkness which eats anything organic (flesh and plant) and can't exist in light. The scary part if you are in dim-light or darkness the ooze will try to quickly fill the space to catch and absorb you. And it is fast.
It is also rather intelligent. If it's prey stays in light too long the Ooze will attempt to craft itself protection from the light from abandoned armor, debris, or whatever container they can get. Going so far to not completely eat a corpse and hiding inside it, using it as a flesh suit in order to get to other tasty morsels.
Like other oozes though it doesn't do well with traveling in water. The players in one of my campaigns ran into a Hungry Darkness on a barren deserted island with an abandoned steam-punk town that was eerily quiet. It was fun watching them figure out how to maneuver around the Darkness and escape the island alive.
Humans.
Like, there are dragons in that world, somewhere a thousand miles away in an unapproachable wilderness. Once ina blue moon a powerful mage might figure out how to summon a demon. Nobody knows what terror lurks in the depths of the open sea.
But those are stories, hushed whispers or grandios fairytales to entertain your children. Yet, everyone knows to fear a determined and powerful human. They can't be reasoned with, they can't be deterred and they will come for you ...
My setting isn’t too fleshed out yet, and there’s probably scarier to come eventually, but currently? The dread reavers.
Humanoid corpses bent and broken to the size and “shape” of a horse, a pair of extra spiked limbs to skewer any poor souls they come across, and a demiplane within their ribcage that’s about the size of a bag of holding, except creatures within don’t need to breathe, eat, sleep, or even drink. Did I mention it has a climbing speed?
…WHAT?!
@@Freezer-DragginBallZ :3
In all my campaigns, there’s an urban legend Simply known as
“the misery”
Essentially, the misery is an ancient horror/insurance
The misery seeks out dark twisted individuals and does *[Redacted]*
The misery is speculated to be either a dead God‘s corpse carrying out its duties, even in the grave. something left over from the creation (even the Gods can’t remember that far back, so who knows) or The shadow of a Primal fear
Evidence of the misery includes hastily scribbled sketches of “something?” (not going into details, but it kind of looks like the collector from hollow night mixed with something truly horrible from world of horror) *Thirdhand* accounts, And horrified looking shadows edged into walls, (Hiroshima and Nagasaki style)
The players have only encountered it once during an evil campaign, the necromancer was trying to do something especially evil that would’ve broke campaign, so I sicked the misery on ‘em
After plenty of warnings of course (breath felt on the back of the neck, cold shivers even in midday sun light, nightmares, eyes in the darkness, me straight up telling him it’s probably a bad idea to continue)
He entered solo combat and lost horribly, emphasis on the horribly and then I made him promise not to tell the others to preserve the mystery and worry of finding the shadow of the necromancer screaming on the side of a building
And still to this very day in my closet somewhere is the character sheet of the necromancer Locked in a box because environmental storytelling is my favorite
Tldr: I invented a shadow monster to make sure murder hoboing doesn’t happen
Silver Kobolds.
Every color of kobold in this setting is different, and silver kobolds are the weirdest. For starters, they are completely averbal. Even attempts to read their thoughts just yields random noises, so while most scholars agree they can understand others, there's no certainty of what they think. Second of all, they have a dragon's tendency to hoard. They aren't quite as selective as dragons, and most of their collection tends to be junk, but they'll hoard anything they can. Sometimes even sentient beings smaller than them wind up in their hoards. Which brings up the most terrifying fact about them...
Any hole they dig to a certain depth becomes the new opening for a portable hole linked to that silver kobold. And if that silver kobold dies, access to that hole is gone, banished to who knows where. Countless priceless antiquities or artifacts of unimaginable power could have been picked up and stuffed in a pocket dimension, and then lost when they absent-mindedly wander into a canyon being hit with a flash flood, or walk past a hungry pack of wolves, or get caught in a shipwreck. And if they set their mind to it, they could make an entire town simply disappear by digging around it.
Silver kobolds have not actually done anything so drastic, of course. They just wander around, digging holes and staring into space with those little red eyes of theirs. But the point isn't what they've done. It's what they could do. And nobody who's not a silver kobold knows what they're going to do next...
this is mine, old creature.
used to deal with murder hobbos.
Void Harrower
Size/Type: Large Aberration (Cosmic)
Hit Points: 85 (10d10 + 30)
Speed: 20 ft.
Armor Class: 16 (Natural Armor)
Initiative: +1
STR: 18 (+4)
DEX: 12 (+1)
CON: 16 (+3)
INT: 14 (+2)
WIS: 13 (+1)
CHA: 17 (+3)
Saving Throws: INT +5, WIS +4
Skills: Arcana +5, Perception +4
Damage Resistances: psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
Condition Immunities: charmed, frightened
Senses: darkvision 120 ft., passive Perception 14
Languages: Deep Speech, telepathy 120 ft.
Challenge: 10 (5,900 XP)
Special Traits
Cosmic Awareness: The Void Harrower cannot be surprised and has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.
Eldritch Spawn: When the Void Harrower is reduced to half its hit points or less, it summons 2 Eldritch Spawn minions. If any Eldritch Spawn are killed, the Void Harrower can use its action to summon 2 replacements.
Actions
Multiattack: The Void Harrower makes two attacks: one with its Grasp of the Void and one with its Abyssal Rend.
Grasp of the Void: Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 15 (2d10 + 4) psychic damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or be pulled up to 20 feet toward the Void Harrower.
Abyssal Rend: Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 18 (2d12 + 4) slashing damage plus 9 (2d8) necrotic damage.
Chaos Shuffle (Recharge 5-6): The Void Harrower emits an eldritch wave in a 30-foot radius. Each creature in that area must succeed on a DC 16 Dexterity saving throw or be teleported to a random unoccupied space within the area and become stunned until the end of their next turn.
Mine is probably Necrolord Nadria, one of the three lords of death whom is a spirit of a child that uses magic threads to control his mother's corpse from afar like a puppet. The most frightening part about him is not necessarily his power, but his childlike unpredictability and desire to turn everything into a game, including life or death situations. That or the undead Tarrasque with a McGuffin implanted in its chest.
I really like that first one, the apocalyptic bird hatching from the moon! I mean, you can't really top a cosmic-level threat like that, except of course, for something with the ability to erase people from existence.
It really depends on the campaign. In one, doorknobs were the most feared thing, in another skeletons. Currently, it's a little girl.
Doorknobs?
@Freezer-DragginBallZ I had a dungeon with an extreme amount of doors, and all of the doorsknobs were trapped. The trap was set off by which way you turned the doorknob. To avoid the barbarian lock pick method, many of the doors were also trapped against being forced open. It was the dungeons' passive security.
Moss. I made a moss that is harmless on it own. when it comes in contact with dead or undead things it goes inside and wears is it as armor and then it becomes hostile to any living thing to spread more moss. One of the reasons why they are so scary is they are kind of hard to kill for the party due to them lacking fire damage and that being its biggest weakness. And the fact that it can combined into a giant moss monster that gets even more resistances, can regenerate (while standing on grass) and deal some nasty damage.
DM friend of mine asked for help designing a BBEG for an island/pirate based campaign. We ended up making something called the ‘Flesh Tide’. Basically an aquatic Lich wanted to create a ‘perfect body’ from several races to inhabit. Undead made from those who died at sea would rise to the surface to collect.
Players did sabotage the final ritual, but the body in question mutated into an enormous mass of flesh and limbs. Without the Lich to direct it, the F.T. reverted to the gather command from earlier, absorbing all life it touched. It took several large ships at full broadside to kill it.
The campaign I’m running takes place in version of the area in Warhammer Fantasy known as the Old Word (which would be the Empire and the surrounding area) as a domain of dread from the Ravenloft setting. The most famous KNOWN creature would probably be some sort of chaos monster or vampire character from the warhammer brand, but I have a unique creature for my campaign.
First thing to note is that the domain has two traits of note. One is that the whole domain is stuck in a ten year long time loop of the time leading up to and of the complete event known as the Endtimes, where the forces of chaos invade the world with the goal of destroying it. How things play out changes each time, but when the ten years are up, and someone is about to win, it resets. Second thing to note is that sometimes creatures from other realities, which add another wrench to the madness of the endtimes. One of these things was a singular mind flayer.
Having a mind flayer in a setting where mind flayers don’t exist would be problem on its own, but this mind flayer is special. One, she was a half-dragon and descendant of an archdruid prior to her transformation and kept the powers, and she was also a friendly NPC from the previous cancelled dnd campaign. But most importantly, she was studying to be chronomancy wizard before being taken to the domain.
Normally otherworld monsters who are taken to the domain are sent somewhere else after the time reset, but this mind flayer was able to use magic to disconnect herself from the loop. Now she acts as a focal point for all timelines past and future. Past and future memories overlap, people who are still alive discover they have been dead for years, and warriors of the faith learn that they have been reading prayer books dedicated to a different god.
And whenever this this mind flayer eats the brain of someone, the brain of all time lines are eaten, and they’re gone forever.
False Hydra by far the single most mind blowing monster that is near impossible to track and kill. First it hides in plain sight in a way that counters most spells used to find things. Singing a song that makes it imperceivable by any that hear its haunting melody. Darkvision, not even close. See invisibility, nope. Detect magic, nice try. As clues start to mount you start to lose your hold on reality as NPC's that were there one day disappear the next and nobody even remembers them. Unless you figure out that you need to remove one of your senses just to be able to perceive the horror your doomed. Even then it is a formidable monster to fight against.
Feel free to use this in one of your future videos. Love your videos BTW.
In a time that predates the war that reset the calendar, events unfurled that laid the foundation for the atrocious amounts of death that came from that war.
Medolise Flaredon is, in simplest terms, the mortal sin of evil as a concept. She was a nun for the church of a now-forgotten god. One day, her village was attacked by a band of raiders, and she was the only survivor. She rescinded the god she worshipped, harnessed the power of an artifact called the Abyss Lantern, and ascended to the heavens and butchered every angel and god in the pantheon that she worshipped. She tore off the wings of the angels and stitched them to her own back. This event, known as "The Great Rebellion" set all divine beings in every pantheon into a great turmoil, and warred with each other. This spurned "The Holy Wars".
At the end of the war, when Medolise was slain, her weapon (a cross-spear that's main tip was a zweihander,)called "Vindicta", was broken, and she fell below the deepest level of hell. The two halves of Vindicta, the zweihander and the cross-spear, became the two most powerful magical artifacts that would ever exist. A forgotten warrior picked up the zweihander called "Dainsleif" and rallied the entire warring south-eastern continent under his name alone. He marched on the east, and glassed a country-sized kingdom in a single night. The spear, now called the "Cross of Mercy" was taken by a man named Saint Vim, and he fought the forgotten warrior alone. In their final clash, both combatants died, and the weapons were lost.
The conflict that was born out of the breaking of Vindicta was called the Great Capital War. Over three hundred million people died in the one month the war lasted. The aftermath was so devastating, all of civilization collectively agreed to reset the calendar. After the pieces of the world had been picked up, the gods sent down the first monsters to the world to ensure that no one would ever become something that Medolise was.
Now, Medolise's name is spoken in hushed whispers, and is now long forgotten by the common folk of the world.
I had come up with some variants of the common medusa. They began as mutations caused by The Time Of Troubles in The Forgotten Realms, but have since begun to breed true.
The Midasa: Physically, there's no difference between the midasa and the medusa. The difference is in their gaze attacks. Instead of turning her victims to stone, the midasa turns her victims into solid gold. Named after King Midas, her gaze can ruin an entire world's economy, by making gold as common as dirt.
The Mirradusa: Again, there's no physical difference between the common medusa and the mirradusa. The difference comes when would be monster hunters try and turn her gaze attack against her. For unlike the common medusa, the mirradusa is immune to her own gaze attack, so reflecting her gaze back at her with a mirror won't work.
The Mambadusa: The only difference between the common medusa and the mambadusa is that the snakes in her hair are all BLACK MAMBAS, arguably the deadliest viper in all known worlds (should look up the effects of black mamba venom for whichever version of D&D youre playing, as it tends to change from edition to edition). You can also create your own effects for black mamba venom if the game's version isn't lethal enough for you.
The Minidusa: The name "minidusa" is something of a misnomer. It has nothing to do with their size. What separates the minidusa from the common medusa, or any of her other cousins for that matter, is a lack of medusa-like abilities. She has no petrifying gaze. The snakes in her hair aren't venomous. She's a totally nerfed medusa. The only thing from her heritage that she maintains is her immunity to the petrifying gaze of her fellow medusae. These medusae dont tend to live very long as they fall easy prey to monster hunters.
in-universe? probably a thing called the Darklander. basically there's a portion of the world called the Darklands which is basically a massive hellscape due to a phenomenon called the Everspell which chucks out a bunch of random (and often very harmful) magical effects across this entire region (which is basically the size of a small continent). the Darklander is one of these magical effects. the Darklander a gigantic sentient cloud of bright pink smoke that very slowly melts and fuses basically anything it comes into contact with, only issue is that it doesn't properly kill anything. anything that should die to its effects instead starts producing some of this smoke, as long as they are in contact with the smoke they will keep on coming back to life, fully concious and aware, no matter how much they are harmed by anything (including the smoke itself). eventually the body breaks down entirely and the conciousness is just left trapped in the remains, it becomes a bit of a "I have no mouth and I must scream" situation.
for my players? the Water Wraith. I made some changes to fit my world's lore but I mostly just copied the whole thing from Pikmin 2.
yeah... I'm not very original on the whole, I mostly just take stuff I find cool and mash it all together. I wonder if anyone will see this and know what inspired the original concept of the Darklander...
Got two, one from the old 3rd edition days and one from 5th, though the older editions were more hardcore and plentiful so I just picked one from memory.
The Teratomorph . . . you've heard of the elusive ethereal ooze that hunts phase spiders and of the gut wrenching bone ooze that ignores the equipment of armies, some insane wizard wondered what would happen if you spliced them together, but the resultant abomination is worse than either component goo. Despite being a mindless monster it's unaffected by any mental effect, similarly despite being a boiling shapeless thing it's not subject to anything which would change its form either; but most confounding of all is it's ability to occasionally ignore spells as if they missed, almost akin to a blink spell dodging a sword swing. This inescapable gargantuan soap bubble is capable of flight and swim faster than any ship, it has blindsight rivaling a drow's darkvision making it a nightmare to sneak by it, it's immune to a handful of elemental hazards and resistant to the rest. On contact, regardless of it lashing out or being struck, it drains a little of all three physical abilities of whoever got involved with it. Every round it randomly planeshifts a creature in its vicinity to another random plane, which can and has been itself. And any unlucky sap that gets grappled by it is disintegrated, but those that get engulfed just seem to stop existing. It's presumed this was also the fate of the wizard who created it as nobody remembers who got the idea or where the thing came from, but the random environmental spells going off in it's wake are uncomfortably explainable.
An Eyebinder in some tongues, Kalaraq Quori in others . . . the insectoid serpentine elemental looking creature is nothing to be underestimated, and those that do either don't live to tell the tale or cannot even under their own volition; some say they're invaders from the realm of shadow, others say they're rulers of dreams, either way they refuse to elaborate further. These things can also fly at will, and must have some sixth sense because they're impossible to surprise no matter if it's hostile or friendly terms; likewise trying to pull the wool over on one is a fools errand as its truesight cuts through any handcrafted or arcane deception, and they're as observant as they are cunning. While they seem fairly vulnerable to conventional injury despite their ethereal appearance, they're a nightmare to pin down as they're outright immune to most combat conditions besides being able to shrug off magic in general. But their essence is rather implacable as they don't even need to fight to make someone change their mind, and those they kill get added to their orbiting swirling collection of arcane eyes in some kind of unholy curse preventing them from being resurrected. The strangest is these things clearly have physical form yet can manifest ghostly qualities at will, favoring intangibility and possession to deny being harmed while turning people to do their own bidding. It's also unknown how many walk our streets and even less known what their goals are, but pray you never find out.
In my campaign, there is the First Hag of the World, a being that came into existence when the 3rd-generation gods(the current gods) were born during the Spell of Creation and the current multiverse came into a stable(ish) form. Whether her creation was intentional or a side effect of the Spell of Creation is unknown, but many people(and even gods) believe her existence to be necessary for the fabric of reality to remain intact. All hags can trace their bloodline directly to her. The First Hag's power is so great, people often attempt to find her instead of beseeching the gods for help, though finding her is the real trick- once a century is a frequent visitor load. If you don't pay up, though... even the gods can't save you, and a botched deal kicked off the current starting arc of my campaign.
First, the pet of the 2nd BBEG in my campaign, The Hydroose.
Imagine a 17 foot draconic canadian goose that has regeneration and fire immunity. Whenever you score a crit, you behead it, but then two more heads take its place, allowing it to bite an additional time per round.
Then there's the Troll Troll, keeper of the 6th dungeon.
He's about the size of a goblin, but has the HP of a troll. Regardless of damage type, when he's knocked to 0 HP, his Regeneration kicks in and heals him to full. Although he only has 1 action to either attack or dodge, he has an infinite amount of Legendary Reactions to cast Counterspell.
Lastly, the Dragonfly, boss of Hybrid Island.
Although its presence is passed off as unimportant, this combination of Fly and Dragon will plague the party with Filth Fever. Despite not having much strength or constitution, it has an insane dexterity plus Greater Evasion and Danger Sense.
Canadian geese are already eldritch horrors, anything more than that would probably destabilize the multiverse.
In most of my settings i always have one constant cryptid that is simply called "the Living Murder". It is a 3 undead creatures bound together in one form due to a murder so vicious and necromancy so foul. It is a skeleton with regeneration wrapped in the discarded flesh and nerves of other victims, lastly, its beating heart is a creature of it's own that when exposed burrows into the chest of a new host. The monster uses its exposed veins as spiked chains and it's nerves to deliever touch spells like shocking grasp, vampiric touch, or if it consumes enough living humanoids finger of death. It is used as a cautionary tale to warn people not to let down their guard.
In my game which i have not used yet it is known as the
Adaptor
The party will first meet a failed experiment that has vulnerability to all damage types then it will adapt to every bit of damage becoming nuetral then resistant until it is immune to all damage. Then once it is immune to all damage it will become vulnerable again. This is just the failed experiment
They will eventually come across one that is nuetral to all damage that then become immune after damage and same process of the failed adaptor applies
Then another one who is resistant to all damage with the same process.
Eventually the final one know as the perfected monstrosity appears then they will find out the final one is completely immune to damage with a high perception and investigation so it can track them the party will have to get far enough away to get away from it then trap it or destroy the controll collar as that will let it be able to communicate with them.
During one of their investigations into the big bad evil guy they will find a laboratory where the big bad experimented with the adaptor and created them where they learn the adaptors were humanoid races experimented on with dr*** and magic till the became huge monstrosities the failed experiment being the smallest at large size
This all points to there being more than one and all look like mutated versions of there base race mostly being beast races such as tabaxi lizard folk and gnolls but also mermaids and they can still be humans or elves
Oh fun fact they are no longer considered their base race and are more animalistic in mind except the perfected kind and they all can breed together meaning there are more in the games lore than the players will meet and are kinda like the deathclaws of fall out and while at first are a myth will eventually be found far and wide
I used monstrosity as a descriptor not the type of monster
This is all typed before i watched the video so i dont know if someone else has the same idea
In my homebrew settings, I had a kind of sea serpent. Basically the world is divided in to two continents but the continents don't know about each other really because of the ocean between them is unpassable. The continent where the players are in happens to be the 'Eastern' continent which suffered a huge cataclysm and has been broken in to four, well continent sized areas. You can travel between the continents because the oceans are shallow and dotted with Islands. The sea serpents literally are way too big to traverse it. However the Ocean in the west is deep and has all the big ones and horrors while the ocean in the east is more shallow which is a bit of perspective all considering. So the offspring of the large ones travel the shallow ocean and grow until they get too big and then head to the east and then once they grow up, they travel to the south or north to return to their original ocean. Regardless, that means that those shallow oceans are basically super dangerous to the point that anybody who tries to cross it without a plan is basically doomed. Also, to make it a bit more interesting, the only natural predator of the sea serpents are basically dragons so you might get attacked by the serpent just to have a dragon decide to get an easy meal but I wouldn't want to be there if a dragon showed up either. Basically turns any sea journey in to a real life or death adventure that you need to plan out and every island can be anything. They go to a fortress just to find it totally destroyed or you go to an Island and try to resupply just to find the entrance in to a cave styled dungeon with something fun. Almost certain death, any number of random adventures that can be thrown in. My favorite things were a kind of a sentient fish creatures that were driven from their homes thanks to a sea serpent. Mermaids that can be playful or even use/call sea serpents so they can claim whatever remains. Old forts that have lost technology/spells/books/lore. I like the lore thing cause you can give players a chance to learn more about the backstory that points them in to the direction of the BBEG.
Anyways, long story long. The sea serpents are basically pretty varied, adults can be the size of islands while the smaller ones can be dozens, if not hundreds of meters long. Some are like an octopus while others are more like eels. They are both incredibly hard hitting, hard to hit, even harder to damage and can cast magic as well as defend against it. They are also incredibly intelligent, patient and cunning. It can plan traps, wait for bad weather, wait till you enter deeper water. I even once had one treat a ship like grapes, just reaching a single tendril up, grabbing one person and then disappearing with him. No sound, no sign, just one less person when the morning came. For an entire trip, one person after another until the captain forcibly grounded the ship and headed up in to the hills. Literal origin story to one of the small island towns, nobody ever ventured out to sea again.
Anyway, try to convince your players to cross the ocean with these around. Ooh, and lets not forget, there is a reason they are there. Plenty of food around so plenty of other dangers.
In my own survival D&D campaign, the scariest and the most frightening thing is the personification, enbodyment and incarnation of the Death itself, which brings a constant sense of threat even if it does not kill until the time comes. It appears whenever one of the player characters is about to die or too exhauted. It can't be killed either because it's immortal and if you fight it, it just poof away says it'll be back.
It depends on the setting…I have several, across multiple systems. I’ll post some standouts.
1) The Nightmare King, Eldritch ruler of the Realm of Nightmares. His horrifying shape a conglomeration of the worst fears and nightmares the viewer has, able to erode your mind with your own fears and nightmares until nothing is left but a mindless husk that knows only terror. Direct confrontation is impossible, only facing his manifestations to drive them out.
2) Void, a humanoid Sphere of Annihilation with bizarre powers that are not any known form of magic and cannot be denied. Void has ended Empires and Gods alike, and none are exactly sure why, some say they stumbled across knowledge it considers forbidden, some say there is something it seeks.
3) The Mimic King, a Mimic so large it has disguised itself as mountains and mysterious islands. This beast is also said to be so intelligent that Dragons are no match for its mind or its age.
For the Fabula Ultima game Im planning, im going to make the D&D Tarrasque actually world ending threat. Only way to incompasitate it is a creation god-level weapon to continuously fire at it. Utilizing clocks to both charge the weapon and deplete metaphysical health will help enable such world-ending conflict.
my campaign has a bit, but are all mostly on an island off the main continent that the humans were given when they first came to the realm (Dimension hope from the help of their god as their world was dying. Fast). There are Owlbears that wait in trees and drop down on any passing creature, flowers that are a foot tall that can easily devour a goliath whole, and then there are the wondering titans of the land. Massive, 50+ meter long chitinous creatures that are capable of digging through stone with their powerful forelimbs (14 legs in total). What nobody really knows though is that when they eat any living creature, they don't just consume the body, but the soul as well. Holding it in a special crystal organ they have developed, where there are thousands of souls trapped until what is known as "The Red Plague" in ancient texts come to take the souls to the afterlife.
The Hunger, a deity of fangs and dark waters and survival of the fittest. It was part of a group of nature deities known as the Dark Elements, which were created from the shadows of the benevolent aspects of the natural world. Most of them existed in whatever demiplane their benevolent counterpart had created, and were generally not something that most mortals had to worry about (unless one of their priests started causing trouble). Not The Hunger, it resided within the oceans of the Material Plane in the form of a dead-white Colossal+ megalodon that was known to devour ships whole; most sea captains would actually maintain a small shrine to The Hunger in their quarters to pray for safe passage, and sailors would often try and wound some of the monstrous creatures that swam with The Hunger if it came for them in the hope that it would focus on something bleeding instead. A few other details: 1) The Hunger would Awaken some predators that swam with it, meaning that a fair few creatures in its hunting pack were intelligent (and a small number even had some cleric levels as a result of their sentience), 2) it wasn't just a mindless eating machine and was capable of conversation (and, more unnerving, playing with its food), and 3) it was originally just a demigod of predators; when the Dark Element of water came to the Material Plane, The Hunger ate her alive and became an intermediate deity after integrating her portfolio into its own.
It's also worth noting that The Hunger was the de facto god worshipped by evil aquatic humanoids, meaning that you would encounter some utterly savage sahuagin tribes or locathah warbands led by a priest of The Hunger. They were not merciful, because nature certainly isn't.
In my setting, it totally depends on who you ask, the comonner in the swamp town, the large frog creatures they deal with daily they call mud broods. The traveler on the road they are most scared of roving feral orc bands, the king of the country, he might be most scared of the rival king. Lore wise it would absolutely be "The One Born of Corruption." Little is known about it and no one can truly tell you much about it other than it exists, and it lives to corrupt. But that setting is over with now, working on a new one while a friend of mine takes over the seat of forever DM, at least for a while.
Look, I'm trying to find a video on this channel that has a story about a campaign taking place in a world where all the gods are dead and the party uses a special artifact to raise a god of the sunrise back to life and start helping him fix stuff and I can't find the video, can yall help me cause I'm starting to think I made the story up
1st edition pathfinder standard will o wisp.
First encounter party had with one, they were level appropriate (by CR) and it wrecked the party. Hovering menacingly over fallen PCs feasting on their fear/despair. (As I tried not to wipe the party).
The campaign (king maker,) had an island that was infested with them.
Level 8 party fled in terror as wisps decloaked and cloaked around them, striking with lightning touch only to fade away again.
Several days of hit and run terror attacks on the party, the PCs finally managed to break contact and flee to their city state.
Party would flinch at even a hint of floating lights, well into 15th level.
I had one that I didn't have the opportunity to flesh out properly since I wrote myself into a corner.
I would like to introduce, The Dusk Death, Jester! The Jester stands roughly around 5'11, but seems to be taller since it's slouched over. Their skin is pale and appears to be rotting. Their figure appears frail and they are lanky with very long limbs. They possess a rusted sword in one hand and in the other have very long claws, but their one defining feature is their cartoonist, unsettling permanent smile that shows their jagged teeth.
Now their role was to be a figure of pure fear. Hell, I made a homebrewed ability that captured that. I threw it at my party at level 1 mainly as a set piece and a force that is not to be taken lightly. I described it being surrounded by corpses of those that it has killed while putting emphasis on it's smile and extremely unsettling and terrifying presences. It worked!
They were supposed to be a general for the bbeg as well as being the court jester for her as well. They could twist the fears of their foes and get into their heads as well . They were twisted and insane. Their battles were shows and their foes were merely props in its performance. All of this was done to ensure that their Mistress was always smiling.
I'm still in the process of making my DND world, but I have a three for one for this.
In the area known as the Green-Back Jungle there's a Huge sized monster simply known as the Emperor of the Jungle, that's stalked the Country wide Jungle for years, slaughtering every traveler and hunting party it's come across yet strangely never bothering with the few towns the various tribes have set up. According to what few reports the tribes have, the beast is near immune to magic and resistant to their weapons, so the only thing to do when the earth starts to shake under it's foot steps is get the hell out of there!
The other is in the Fallen-Star Desert the southern most continent in my world, and is a Gargantuan sized Scorpion called the Desert Hunter. This thing unlike it's jungle counterpart is a stealth hunter, and most don't know it's upon them until it's to late, though again it avoided the already established cities.
I'm planning to make more giant monsters like this, one for each country with the main similarities being the following:
1; Their shape can't be changed,
2; each has it's own damage resistance including non-Adamantine weapons,
3; their normal attacks count as magical
4; are Huge sized or larger
5; have been around for at least 100 years
6; Each creature MUST have some kind of impact on the country as a whole and not just one small part
Finally is my reskin of the Tarrasque which for now has the name 'Megachimerus'. An absolutely ancient beast with the wings of a dragon even though it can't fly and instead uses them to assist in jumps or makes gusts of wind, the tail of a scorpion that concludes in a the head of a giant cobra with the scorpion's stinger as the tongue, has a body reminiscent of a centaur only instead of a horse it's a black panther with the legs looking like those of a crab, the tentacles of a Displacer Beast, the upper torso is that of a silverback gorilla covered in the plates of a pangolin, and finally the head of komodo dragon.
Yeah it's a damn beast, that I have no idea if/when I'll use it in a campaign outside a 1 shot but I have it just incase I need it.
My friends setting has these god like entities that are basically new gods but they are very real in the realm and the gods can’t really do anything about them themselves because their power don’t work on them.
One of these new gods. Is an ouroboros. For those who don’t know the ouroboros is a mythical snake dragon like creature that is often depicted as being long enough to form a circle by eating its own tail. This being also is told to always reincarnate when it dies. So here’s the kicker the one in my friends campaign is exactly that. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if in the unlikely scenario you do manage to kill it, it comes back stronger and angrier.
Now you might think of the idea to seal it somehow. Slight problem it will break out and when it does it will be even more angry at whoever sealed it. Now that wouldn’t be as much of an issue was it not for the fact that they tried it once and the ouroboros has broken out in 1 month.
So the next idea might be to use items and weapon that are meant to kill something permanently. But once again the ouroboros just shrug’s it off like everything else.
Now there is a way to get rid of the ouroboros the Dm said so themself. They just haven’t found the way to get rid of em yet.
For me, it’s the creature that I try and use in every game, the eyebear, think an owlbear but it’s body is completely covered in eyes of various different shapes and sizes, as well as the eyestalks of an eye tyrant like a spectator or a beholder, fit with the appropriate eye rays
Echidna.
Echidna is technically a god due to being born from nothing, Echidna was so powerful that his birth created the primordial monsters, only one of these monsters still remains but some of them have living heirs, Echidna’s death at the hands of an unknown force caused a new biome to be brought into the world, he was also denied passage into the afterlife due to his immortality, his corpse is still immensely powerful after he died, his corpse is currently held in the castle of his son; Raru, who is working to resurrect him
One that I created by accident with a Pokemon Fusion generator is called Kabucruel, and basically answers the question "What if The Kraken (TM) was turned into am eldritch abomination?" You get a horrifying creature that terrorizes the seas and has taken down even the most powerful naval warship that any kingdom has constructed.
Really, any answer I give could end up changing 4 weeks from now, maybe even multiple times.
Even then it’s difficult since everything in my world is technically beatable by anyone. RPG XP and stuff is kind of a real phenomenon, and it can allow almost any person to perform impossible act of skill or strength if the situation warrants an enhancement to their natural abilities.
If I were to choose something though, it could be one of the ancient creatures, but since almost nobody knows they exist and they aren’t really a direct threat to anyone unless something confronts them, the next things would probably be Abhorrences and Sand Leviathans. I’m going to talk about the former as o think they are more interesting.
Abhorrences are massive, black, starfish like creatures who stand at about 2 stories tall. They walk around on land with the use of their 5 thick tentacles/tendrils. Each tentacle has an acid-green eye on the lower portion that possesses exceptional sight, they also have one on the underside of their main body. An Ahorrence is basically a freak of nature that has been blasted full of mana, and so they possess many inexplicable traits. Their blood is highly corrosive, they possess regenerative abilities, supposedly even being able to regenerate a full body from a discarded tentacle if left for long enough, their eyes have the ability to see through magical effects and illusions (so basically just Truesight) and have the ability to petrify creatures, but instead of stone, they cause excessive amounts of a flesh like substance to be produced from the immobilised creature. Their magic nature also allows them to absorb some amount of magic and even twist it (so cast spells). They also have some level of intelligence since to wield magic in my world, a creature must be ‘sentient’ and posses the willpower to do it, meaning that for the most part, only intelligent and semi intelligent species are capable of twisting magic.
Abhorrences are fairly rare, you might encounter one one or twice a decade, but when they do show up, their bound to wreak havoc on a fairly substantial area before a person or people strong enough to kill it arrive.
The starbound:
The starbound are a race of psychic zombies created by an evil sphinx named Elmyra. They spread like any normal zombie plague, which is scary enough on it’s own. But what takes the starbound to a while nother level the fact that they are a super intelligent hive mind. Elmyra can see and hear through all their senses at once and do advanced tactics and even have her starbound trails cast magic. She is especially fond of psychic damaging spells and screwing with peoples perception and very much likes playing with her food.
The Evil Goose.
Famously weak and recently found to be strangely resilient against most dmg on the teams last fight and failed to dmg them.
They need to save against its Hateful Aura or feel Frightened.
Its stats are abysmal but they are slowly improving as it comes back to life each time it dies. It started at lvl 1 with 1 in each stat, which improved to 2 as it rose at lvl 2 and has a lvl in each of 13 classes all at once. The team managed to skip lvl 3 and 4 fights by trapping the Evil Goose inside a cursed Mirror that would swap someone looking at its reflection with a contested Charisma check from who's inside and Charisma save from who's outside. At lvl 5 it could cast Remove Curse and force extraction from the Mirror but waited until the party engaged in battle to force itself out and attack.
It is also a shapesgifting creature but the party have always only found the Goose form.
It's supposed to be a fraction from a Hateful Evil God that had to be sealed away inside a Dark Sun. Its real form is a boogey man to even some Gods. It is meant to be a possible final boss. The Goose is slowly regaining parts of its power as it dies and returns in 2d4-1 days. If it reaches lvl 20 and is killed without the party finding a way to its real body and killing it, it will break free and return to the Material realm to wreck havok all across the World.
My hope is that the party repairs the relationship between 2 sibling Gods that are borderline opposites and have been at an all-out war since time immemorial and with the blessing of both Gods and their at the time broken builds with top-notch magic items be sent inside the Dark Sun to put a stop to its real form before it destroys the World.
I haven't yet finished or used that setting, but "the spores" - an ancient species that supposedly destroyed the underground dwarven nation underneath the kingdom where my game is set. That kingdom was destroyed and left millenia ago, but still the spores are alive and active as some silver miners found out the hard way after accidentially digging into the infested caves. Since then there is a constant struggle to keep the spores from overrunning the caves and potentially the kingdom or maybe even the entire world.
Every living creature infected with spores will eventually lose the ability to think for themselves and instead attack every other living being in sight with the target of spreading the spores even further - similar to a zombie. The only ways of getting rid of the decease is to cut off infected limbs or to use a powerfull and specific healing magic. For strange and unknown reasons there are also the elders. Spore infected warriors and monstrous creatures, who kept their intelligence after being infected. The elders also kept their powers and most of their personality, but serving the spores will take priority over anything from their live before the infection. It is unknown whether or not the elder are having an own personality or are aware of their situation, but in some cases they did recall memories from their past live. There also is a rumour that one of those elders is an ancient white dragon and another one a legendary hero of the kingdom. Also there are stories about adventurers being turned into elders and then leading their friends into traps.
Because of the notoriety of the spore several factions have formed around their existence like the starsingers, a religious cult who believes they need to draw powers from the stars to destroy the spores and therefor want to open the caves to expose the spores to starlight or the cavewatch, a special unit founded by the king in order to protect expeditions and in order to keep unprepared adventurers from wandering too far into the caves and being turned into zombies or elders. There is also an organication of scientists who want to do research and a mining company who just want to keep their mines save and running, but I didn't come up with names for those.
right now, for my party...its Saint Nicks evil sister, (also our guild masters sister...yes Santa is his brother) we beat her in a Christmas 1 shot 2 years ago but failed to kill her, and now shes got her hands in everything happening to us. buffing monsters and empowering all manner of creatures. she could face us again but what little we have learned is she is still recovering her strength.
In my setting it would be the ghosts.
In my settings there are 3 main types of magic :
"Natural" magic : magic engraved in one's dna, which is the reason why dragons have breath weapons for exemple.
"Scientific" magic : achieved through study and research, and most spellcasters use this.
"Faith" magic : magic that works exclusivly because you believe in it hard enough. Even if your belief is absolutly false, if there are enough people that thinks that there is a guardian spirit in the sea for enough time, one might begin to exist. It is unusual and generaly weak, since most of the time it's an actual god blessing you, so the complicated spellcraft is handled by a being of far superior power and intellect.
So Will in itself has an influence on the universe, so what makes the ghosts specials? They are are single will so powerful they are they own source of magic, someone that wanted to live so bad their mind took form despite being cut from the magic of their body.
Sending your mind elsewhere is fine as long as you have the magic energy and knowledge to do so, but this is closer to the creation of the first gods than anything else.
After all why the first gods exists? The main theory is that their will was enough to create them from nothing, since even them only know that one day their just started to exist in a physical body.
And since the main power of a ghost is it's will, it's one of the sole creature that cannot be destroyed by using a superior amount of power, their sole weakness being that they are souls. And only some gods, chosen ones and mystic being have the capacity to directly target the soul.
So if one appears, we're all really screwed, cause bullets fireballs and swords won't do much, and if it wants to kill us, it will outlast everyone on the battlefield.
Oh, and most of the ghosts turn crazy really fast.
Probably the Zombie T-Rex we faced during the first few months of our current campaign, and my character is a centaur paladin so you can figure out I was scared for my character life
I have one. It's a creature that looks like an old man in green raggy robes, no shoes, curly white hair, and a gnarled shillelagh in hand. No one who has survived him has ever seen what he actually looks like because locking eyes with him will transport you to his realm, which is a foggy forest filled with deadly animated trees, roots, vines, and wood-carved forest animals. He is a legend in our world who has a reputation for whisking away people are caught off the beaten path of his forests. You know he's coming when the forest goes quiet, and you feel a silent wind tugging at your clothes. You can hear him knocking his shillelagh on the tree trunks as he approaches. With every knock, you must pass a wisdom check to avoid looking at him. When the sounds of the forest resume, he has departed, and you are safe.
The serpent of the ice floes. She has the heart pearls of 3 other true dragons to fuel her power. She scours the realm for power in order to rule the cycle of life and death. Her main avatar is a Colossal serpent that can rival the tarrasque in size when coiled up.
In my Radiant Citadel campaignn, it's the Primal Forces. tl:dr, my party wanted a myth arc, so I gave them a myth arc.
The Primal forces are four Elder Elementals, Ifreann the Phoenix, Scoilte the Zaratan, Caolaigh the Leviathan, and Stoirm the Elder Tempest. Thousands of years ago, the four were summoned and ravaged the Radiant Citadel and its kingdoms so severely, it was the end of the Citadel and everyone who knows of them is terrified at the mere thought of them escaping their prison. Each of the four is both sapient and actively malevolent, and each being a living extinction event and potential planetary apocalypse on their own.
Of course, now an evil cult is attempting to set them free to ravage the multiverse, and everyone is rather frightened of that happening.
There's a rationalization I've got of the Outer Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos; they are entities born of the psychic fear of the unknown, and are thus symbolically tied to that fear. Thus, they can be killed by giving lie to their existence by showing that the unknown is MEANT to be understood and defeated eventually; in other words, a physical representation of the mono-myth... Which is to say in the setting I'm workshopping, anything resembling the Great Old Ones or Outer Gods are dead, and their remains are in a place "deeper" than the "lower planes"; what's really scary, is the question of what kind of things a person must have witnessed that even very concept of "the unknowable" cannot find anything to clutch onto in his heart and mind whatsoever.
... people's imagination of what kind of person they were has spawned a different kind of eldritch horror, "the watchers of eternity", creatures that merely being able to confirm their existence causes people to lose faith in the unknown being truly unknown, and become unable to lie or keep a secret without becoming sickened, have this consistent sense that they are being watched, and whenever they find out there's something they don't know they become obsessed with finding the answer in the belief its impossible that "nobody knows" to the point one has to physically drag them away from this pursuit.
Those who see them in person? They get the immediate impression that not only do the "Watchers" know exactly every way they could deal with them, and that they are perfectly capable of doing every single of of those ways; if such a person so much as believes they have drawn the Watcher's ire, they instinctually curl up into the fetal position and start begging for their life (or whatever they value more than their lives) up until it crosses their mind that if the watchers wanted to take their life or whatever from them they would already have done so.
Is the first story talking about Boarding Party's pokemon D&D? If not, it sounds almost exactly similar to the plotline of it.
In my universe there is a giant holy beast created by eldritch beings that was so strong the most powerful being in the multiverse had to take it down. It was a rogue creature, that destroyed a civilization before being finally defeated. It’s damage output is quadrupled against undead and it can gain immunity to effects and damage it is subjugated to. Ran an entire campaign about killing the thing
The most terrifying creature I can think of is The Clown from Space Station 13. These entities are always found meddling or causing the most dire of emergencies. I have seen clowns invent electric guillotines, invade a xenomorph nest to throw plants and chairs at the queen, and even leverage open a person's chest with a crowbar to provide "lung extensions."
I like the weeping angels. They come off as a combination of the Doctor Who ones and the Witches from Left 4 Dead with a little venus flytrap in the mix.
In my group of friends we have the most horrible and fearsome creature ever, that is found across all these universes and dimensions... The CURSO!
It's an Owlbear, but with a pun in Portuguese as its name, Coruja = Owl and Urso = Bear. Curso = Course.
The Sun. In one of my campaigns, planets are based on a planetary beast which shapes the planet it inhabits. Stars also have one of these beast and the Sun believes its a god and wish to devour any planets that it can get its hands on. This process is being delayed by one person, who is stationed by the Sun to make sure its in check.
In one of my settings, there is a species of jellyfish known as the Festering Jellies that floats in massive swarms through the skies, like living air balloons. They spread a psionic field of energy that infects sentient creatures with a psionic virus that makes them want to go out and stand over the open sky as the jellyfish swarm floats over them. The Festering Jellies will stretch out a mass of bluish-purple tendrils with hooks and grab hold of the sentient before dragging their unresponsive body up into the swarm where their bodies are not eaten. Instead, they are kept alive within the swarm which keeps these poor souls alive with nutrients fed to them through the tendrils while they are kept docile by the swarm's psionic powers, used as living incubators for the swarm's eggs.
Those few who have survived the experience have either committed suicide or been driven insane. And those few who have survived the experience are not safe even afterward. Their bodies are infected with the Festering Jellies' eggs and after they die these minuscule eggs, around the size of a fish egg, will hatch and the small jelly larva will devour the corpse before burrow to the closest surface so they can psionically float away and start a fresh new swarm.
There is a near-constant war against the Festering Jellies with specific fleets of airships, specialized spell casters, and even guilds of hunters dedicated to eradicating them. But the swarms persist even after losing more than eight of their number as they can reproduce rapidly.
The biggest thing that makes the Festering Jellies so frightening to the people of this world is the fact that scholars have determined that these jellyfish do not need to use sentients as incubators. They just chose to. They were told this by one o those swarms when attempting to communicate with it. "We do not need to reproduce with thinkers. We just chose to."
Not because they want to, not because they need to, not because they enjoy to, not because they are told to, not because they have to. But because they just chose to. And that. That is terrifying.
My setting is more or less full of these, but I’ll do one of the more fun ones.
Puppet crawlers are a species of centipede that reach lengths of between 6-12 feet long. They’re also capable of generating powerful electrical shocks, commonly used to paralyze prey.
If that weren’t bad enough, these baddies are parasitic. When the adults aren’t particularly hungry, they treat their prey very differently. Each adult’s face is equipped with an ovipositor that injects eggs directly into the victim’s throat. These eggs hatch within minutes, and the resulting swarm of young rapidly devour their new host’s internals.
It gets worse.
After turning their new host into a bag of skin and bones, the larval centipedes will twist around its bones and align themselves into something akin to a muscle structure.
It isn’t uncommon to see these puppets shambling around outside humanoid settlements, and they should never be approached for a few reasons. Firstly, they smell. Secondly, those babies are growing. As young Puppet Crawlers mature, they grow quite rapidly. In order to remain protected from predators and sunlight, they must gain additional cover.
If another humanoid gets too close to a puppet, the fiend will violently attack them and vomit centipedes from its mouth and eye-sockets. From there, the process repeats itself, and now the first batch has split itself neatly in two.
This process continues until each swarm is left with too few Crawlers to adequately manipulate their puppets, at which point the now fully grown invertebrates burst out to find a host and begin the cycle anew.
If left unchecked, Puppet Crawler populations can explode almost overnight. They are to be killed on sight at all costs.
Additionally, rumors persist that swarms of adults are capable of puppeteering corpses as well, even creatures as large as dead dragons.
so far this campaign, it's a three way tie between a young red dragon tossing Pyrotechnics, from which my party ran away twice, a Magma Dragon, because the party saw her basically one-shot the rogue for touching her hoard, and regular low level skeleton wizards spamming Magic Missile. everyone but one person in the party hid from them like babies, leading to that one person getting all 120 damage worth of Magic Missiles that round.
Mine is the BBEG of my first campaign: The Engineer.
Once an ambitious young innventor, a plan created by the God of fate(which has been demoted to God of death by their own child) to restore themselves to their former power unleashed a demon on the mortal, futuristic world. The inventor created a drug that increased the best aspects of ones self, whether it be increased physical strength, intelligence or even magical prowess. The demon, corrupted the drug and made all of those who used it into a mindless, zombielike slave in order to gain enough forces to find the magical bracelets which currently process the God of Kate's powers.The inventor once got into battle with the demon himself, using his innate ability to control all metals to his advantage, but the demon ultimately came out on top. While not dead, the inventor now processed a ticking time bomb, which would corrupt his mind into fulfilling out the God of Kate's notices by any means nessacary. If the things go to plan in the prequel oneshot that is set in the same world, this would set up the backstory for the BBEG in my 1st campaign.
The Engineer is what remains after the inventors' consciousness has been removed, and is a cruel, sadistic, and maniacal being the has conquered much of the in-game world. His ability to control all metals has made even the most powerful technology useless, and would eventually come back from death ad a living virus, which can also control all screens and computer programs.
One example of The Engineer's treachery is the time when he forced one of the player characters to kill one of their friendly npcs to escape from being captured, and after they chose to shoot the npc(who was actually a friendly ghost, and leader of the resistance against The Engineer), he just killed the other npc just for the fun of it. Other atrocities include fusing human DNA with that of animals, putting Bombs in the brains of all of his soldiers, which can be remote denotated at any time for any reason, and ATOMIZING AN ENTIRE CITY.
This villain was at first made by because I felt my friends dnd villains didn't have enough presence within the narrative, and I think I delivered with this one.
The Black Omit.
Born as a universe collapses in on itself, they are both a blessing, and a curse.
Six legs, and a body darker than the abyss itsels, with a long tail eith a three fingered hand, curled into a ball, at its tip. Gills line its neck, allowing it to sense heat, and tendrils reside in the portsl in its mouth, ready to draw in prey.
A being with an insatiable appetite, and the ability to hop dimensions, these oddly lizardlike creatures seek to do only one thing.
Fill their internal worlds.
The Omit, in truth, is formed around a planetoid. The last planetoid of its universe. With an artificial sun, and a rudementary inteligence that griws over their eternal life, Omits seek to fill their worlds with life, and watch them, like a human watches a terarrium.
To fill it, they will find cretures they find interesting, or particularly tasty, and devoir them whole, sending them to their internal plane to live out their lives.
Some people tell of worlds, galaxies, and even universes developing in the oldest of these beings, but being almost impossible to leave. Only shofting to another plane MIGHT let one escape, but all those who know that soell leave too soon to teach it to others.
In my world: Elves
In my old world, it would have to have been the Styx Hunter.
Some two hundred years before the events of my second campaign, legends began to spread of a beast that lurked in the outer realms. It would roam the River Styx, hunting demon and devil alike. It was wildly effective, capable of taking down pit fiends on its own. All evidence found it hunted with a bow and sword. All demons and devils interigated for information would find large chunks of the memory missing, leading to the possibility that it stole memory from its prey. these tales would flow into the warlocks of these fiends on the Material Plane. Some see these stories as terrifing because this creature can hunt, kill, and scare the souls of the damned. But, as well, some see it as a rightous soul, speculating it to be a fallen angel seeking redemption, a lost soul out for revenge, or the manefestation of the River Styx itself.
The truth is more tragic. Before it was the Styx Hunter, he was a simple dragonborn named Torend. He was played by one of my players at the time, and had the goal to be the greatest hunter in the world. Early into his journey, he would partner with a group of people that would go onto become legends. Among those people, he found the love of his life, his girlfriend's character. Sadly, she was decended from giants, meaning they were unlikely at best to produce children. Over their journey, she would eventually make a deal with Asmodeus to be freed from her previous patron.
This group would grow to known as the Exemplars. Then, one the eve one of their most told battles, Torend watched his love vanish in from of his eyes. Takeing his leave, he sought to find her. Knowing her patron, he found a portal to the Nine Hells, and began his hunt. Not long into it, he was forced into a retreat back into the top layer of Limbo (it and Avernus are one in the same at this time). Here, he was forced back too far, and fell into the River Styx. Nomraly, this would shred a mortal soul to its basest components, rip memories away, and reforge them into larvae. Torend managed to hold onto one shred of his past life as he drowned though.
It does not know what it is. Who it was. Or where it is. All it knows is it must find someone. But who? Where is she? How does it know its a she? Who was she to him? Was it a he? It can't remember. It can barley speak, only mimicing the words its prey have said to it. Certain sounds ring bells to it. Hells. Devil. Hunter. Giant. Asmodeus. That last one almost forms something. A memory? What are memories? It doesn't matter. It must find its prey. For that is all it has to be. Why else does it hunt?
As to what this monster looks like, it is a medium sized fiend that looks a lot like a bipedal water skink in its shape. It has two eyes on the sides of its head. Both pitch black in color. Its scales are an unheathy light grey, almost like volcanic ash or dust. It makes no noise as it prowls the land, almost as if it has forgotten sound as well as its past life. Its left arm has two black bone like growths that form a bow shape. Connecting these two growths is a thread of silver wire. When it is pulled back, it creates an arrow of solid ice. This arrow is made from the waters of River Styx.
It prefers to kill from a distance. but, in some rare cases, it will get close, and try to kill you with a blade it keep sheathed in a growth on its right leg. This blade has a handel and pommel made of bone form an unknown source. The blade itself is steel as black as night, and cold as ice. It is belived this sword was forged from a glacier the flowed along the river. Regardless, if amortal is killed by either of these weapons, their soul is shreded like tissue paper flushed down a toilet, while more importal beings leave missing memories, and sometimes may even forget what they are entirely. Not even crossing the river saves you,as it is capable of swimming in the water with no downsides.
Thankfully to most mortals, it largely ignore non fiends that wind up near its territory. but, sometimes, it may choose to hunt you down. Think like a mix between Predator and Alien Isolation. It never goes to far away from the river, but if you ever wind up down here, justified or not, then be warned, the hunter is always near.
Squirrels! None of my players even remember their names. But imagine Doomsday Were Split into a bunch of Squirrels!
Modified the Nightwalker and dialed it up to 40k. Basically now they can double as doppelgängers for creatures they replace and consume, increasing their total health by the max hp of the creature consumed along with the form skills memories and abilities that come with it. Oh and they are much more intelligent and able to resist necromantic control. Oh yeah and they can push people into the negative plane to summon more of them.
This occurred as a result of a campaign where the essences of life and death as concepts were starting to weaken and disappear and so something needed to be done to shock the cycle of life and death back into functioning properly.
As a result awakening Nightwalkers became a thing and once they gained proper intelligence they quickly figured out these other abilities that they innately had but just didn’t have the intelligence to use before.
Now they’re much more cunning and a far bigger threat to the world at large infiltrating positions of power to create horrible systems to drain the will to live from everything around while summoning more of their kind to invade.
Needless to say my players get very on edge any time they have to deal with unknown necromantic magic so they don’t open a portal to the negative plane.
Being that I'm running a Transformers TTRPG campaign, there's not really anything more frightening in that universe than the Chaos-Bringer himself, Unicron. For those who don't know, he's God of Evil in the Transformers mythos. He and his brother Primus have been warring since time immemorial. Unicron consumed worlds to increase his power so he could defeat Primus, but Primus created the original Thirteen Primes, the first Cybertronians, before becoming Cybertron itself. The Primes defeated Unicron and cast him out, where he's slumbered ever since. His blood, Dark Energon, can reanimate the dead as zombies under his control. In my campaign, he's going to resurrect the villains the party kills as his generals, which the party must defeat before they can battle Unicron. But the longer they take, Unicron will consume the Cybertronian colony worlds, killing millions including named NPCs, and become stronger.
I'm also gearing up for a Star Wars Force and Destiny campaign, and there it's easily the Star Weirds. These apparitions attack Force Wielders during Hyperspace travel, and there's nothing you can do to fight them off.
You missed a chance to call them Maxalotls
The Upended
They're "invincible" creatures who can only be "killed" by using the Remove Curse spell or by running away. They hate being sensed and once detected, they hunt creatures and tear them to ribbons. You can't mercy kill a creature caught by the Upended either, they can only die when an Upended chooses.
I run a Terrairia calamity mod inspired campaign so… yeah. But the most feared creature (not calamitas or Yharim) is tied between Yharon, Jungle dragon of rebirth, or the Devourer of Gods
The Ancient Darkness, known also as the Void. So feared is the void that even lesser powers are willing to form a ceasefire just to put this force back to sleep before it wipes out all existence. So feared is the void that the knowledge of this ultimate destructive force has been purged from most lexicons and memories, ensuring that the Ancient Darkness cannot be woken by the reckless few. Yet even in sleep, the void extends its reach and entices its pawns to bring about the end of all things.
isn't the moonbeast from the first submission literally just that bird thing inside the moon from local58 lol
The Sickle Dancer, thank you Sersa Victory.
The demo king mordao he once ruled the realm but three heroes slayed him. But he did not die only locked away till the time is right and that time is here
I have what i call the daughters of Azharul they are the result of a group of adventureres several thousand years ago within my setting managing to break Tiamat who was summoned to the material plane with the aid of part of Tiamat semi rebelling agains the main mind, When i say break Tiamat i actively mean splitting her into pieces thanks to the heads fighting over who is in control.
The daughters are each mid god level entities that wonder the material plane. They are revered as gods, have cults dedicated to each of them as Tiamat is long forgotten.
Most terrifying factor? Their divine magic with the ability to pull on Tiamats' original power at a small risk of losing what humanity they have developed over the several thousands of years being around.
Well there's two and both are homebrewish. See my players wanted a survival compaign so each section of jungle I made has a random encounter table. But I threw in a few basic homebrew creatures to throw the unexpected at them. The first is an unnamed monster but for now we'll call it Gliscor, why? Because I basically made them a bat with a scorprion tail and all it literally is, is a bat stat block with the sting ability from a scorpion stat block. My players encountered it in our first session and when I described it I go "You know the pokemon Gliscor." "Oh yeah that's my favorite." "Oh well probably not anymore as you see this thing lunged at your head with its stinger."
Next is Fireflies. I know what you're thinking. What's so scary about fireflies? Well they're not so much flies as they are reskinned Gold Dragon Wyrmlings because I didn't want to have dragons as wild monsters. Otherwise mechanically they are the same. I still haven't given them a quest to catch fireflies but it's only a matter of time.
Chormatic and Metalic Dragons. In my Eberron I did away with their usual rivalries and made them a unified civilization, which is as if not more advanced than our modern civilization, instead their limiting factor is that they can only have so many of thier kind outside of their home continent else he Demon Lord Tiamat will awake and kill and/or enslave all of them. What makes them more terrifying is that whenever they go abroad they never go alone, any dragon older than an adult will always have 4 Half Dragon Sorcerers, 8 Dragonborn Warriors, and 16 kobold rouges, all LvL 20, that act as their entourage. Why are they so OP? Well Dragons are capable of learning and casting 10th, 11th, and 12th level Spells, and their entourage act as both the Dragons bodyguards *and* their prison guards.
Probably a hateful Lich because they make other undead. Imagine your toddler getting turned into a skeleton, and imagine the rest becoming another type of undead called a Skrelch(inverse skeleton named off sound it makes moving).
"The Prince of the Forest"
It looks and acts as a child , it wears a simple wood mask , flower crown , dark crimson cloak , average low born clother and is barefoot ; it appears at anytime on the central woodlands (massive mix of forest , mire and bog the size of a country) were historically a lot of ancient kingdoms used to exist , he is very curious and harmless enough if it chooses to aproach you , people say you only have to present him with a toy , candy or similar to get him to talk or leave you alone , if you dont it will get angry and before you know it you are sorrounded by a dozen child size figures wearing animal masks and rudimentary weapons , other times are werebeasts , chimeras , wood knights , the stories changes from place to place ; stories about it go back many many generations , common folk fear it because just like a child it is unpredictable and is as likely to guide you to trasure as it is to get you kill , he only attack older kids (teens) and adults , while protecting kids from danger , so this cause a lot of trouble for people because children lean no to fear the dangers of the forest
"The Princess of the Forest"
Some tales say she is the older sister of the prince , others that his mother , other that she is the spirit of the forest keeping the prince from growing stronger ; she looks like a young beautiful maiden with a white folk dress and a crown of flowers and feathers , nobody recalls anything specific of her looks save for her otherworldy beauty ; if find with the prince you should not be afriad and should leave them alone , the problem is when she is alone , tales say she entice young man and woman alike , you can appease her with a gift , problem is that unlike the prince , nobody knows what to give her , from jewelry to blood has been quoted by survivors , other say they she even accepts intangible gifts such as their first kiss , a song , knowledge and even their love , if you fail to give something or if rejected you find yourself attacked by the forest itself ; unlike the prince she is more matured and can be properly spoken , some even say they convince her to let them go without giving her a gift ; she can appear before anyone but is most commonly seen by young men and woman , she also protects children and couples in love while in the forest
"Cinder Archons"
Ancient Heroes that consume the souls of dragons during the Age of Dragons , they were betrayed by their allies and the gods themselves (diferent set than the current ones) because they had grown to powerful and were sealed on deep tombs because they could no be killed , then they were erased from history as part of a spell to diminish their power , all knowledge of them was passed thru clergy and noble families , but for many year recently tales of them have resurface among the common folk and stories about their apocaliptic return are growing
"Cinder Knights"
The lieutenants of the Cinder Archons , all dragonborn and former slaves of dragons during their time , each carrying the undiying flame of original dragons (original dragons used raw magic breath and could use all elements) that can reduce any mortal being into ash with a single touch and consume their soul trapping them in endless torment inside them , recently a lot of tales about sightings have been spreading among the commonfolk
We should have gone after the beyond ancient shadow dragon when it was a side mission. It's now a undead thrall of the bbeg.
The Chess Set nothing sets my players in serious mode than when they are involved.
Pawns
Bishops
Rooks
The Queen
The pawns are individuals who have been expiramented on and have had metals and weapons grafted on them.
Created by taking a person killing them grafting the weapons on them then reviving them again. Assaulting them with necromancy til they are killed and rezzed again then rezzed once more tp be subservient minions. They have magic packed inside them so when they are killed nobody can replicate them and harm anyone near them.
The Bishops are Cleric, Paladins and Druids grafted together and travel in pairs one in an attack stance the other in a defensive one. They have access to spell casting and can command the pawns.
The Rooks are individuals who have had more extensive surgeries. They are large and deadly defenders of key areas. Typically they are created in pairs and each pair has its own unique trait. The best way to think of them is Mr X from Resident Evil.
The Queen is a being created from grafted dragons and acts as the key protector of the king. The queen is also capable of all types of movement so running from it is very difficult.
The King is the Creator of the set. Anyone can become the king but the knowledge is held by 2 individuals and one of them has recently been defeated and sealed away.
But like all BBEGs he will be back.
The Daevan Lords, and their Servants.
The Daevan themselves aren’t creatures so much as they are demi-deities, and I can’t quite count them as creatures, but their servants are something you never want to run into.
Specifically the servants of Pazul-Bahgoula, the Beldahm.
The Beldahm rarely ever kill, and are almost never seen, so what makes them so tariffing?
Pazul is known as the queen of dread. The keeper, and in some cases the protector. She preserves innocence at any cost, and will answer the desperate cries of children.
If a child is suffering, the Queen will send her Beldahm, who relentlessly pursue the children of the region, to try an preserve them. Regardless of weather or not they are the same child that called them.
Adults don’t see them, mistaking them for Trees, dark corners, or shadows. But they always see the effects. The children they target almost always become sick, and delirious loosing more and more if themselves, slowly wanting to get closer to the Beldahm.
The parents will try their hardest to keep the children from going into the woods, but it almost always fails, and when the Beldahm takes the child by the hand, they walk to the nearest body of water, and both walk in. The child is taken to Pazul and never seen again.
I created a homebrew final boss for Hoard of the Dragons follow up to the Rise of Tiamat. Lahamu, Daughter of Tiamat. She is once a Red Dragon during the great War between Tiamat and Bahamut based on the difference to their ideals. She has witnessed Tiamat's defeat and was sent to Avernus she retaliate to her uncle and was sadly killed. In time her corpse decay but soon her heart made flesh was preserve from utter resentment to Bahamut causing to crystallized it and begins to accend into a new draconic being. Unholy Greatwyrm. A death dragon to be specific. Her flesh have been revitalize into a Chromatic Umbral color with her eyes changed from pure orange into a necrotic purple. She vowed to find and killed Bahamut but she has been dead for some time that the world changed. She sees humans Elves, Dwarf etc. Live together. She may be once a Red Dragon and now a newly sub species of a dragon. She still have a calm mind and more tactical method. She Polymorph herself into a Elf like Dragonic Bloodline Sorcerer to live in secret to learn the new world.
In time She understood the world, lore, and legends from Tiamat and Bahamut she decided to find a way to free her mother, but to do that she needs allies.
During within decades, to centuries she gained allies to the point her preaching of why the world is wrong and only the Dragons are the true rulers. She even gain faithful allies that they are assign generals of each of the roles and bless of draconic ability and Tiamat's blessings.
Moral of the story I change the scenario that the cultists are attacking small towns, taking treasures, prisoners or even new allies. To be added to the ranks. While prisoners are being held experiments to turn them into draconic hybrids as a personal dragon army to destroy Faerune and become the new ruler of the realm under her mother's name.
I had a team go through a 30 floor tower on the season finale. 4 months it took them to make it all the way to the top despite they are locked out of long rest, cause they at a time limit to reach before they reach the Well of the Dragons.
Her fight at the top last almost a total of 20 Hours. The dice gods bless them with Nat 20s to avoid or survived her attacks. The guys were mentally tired after seeing their dices rolls.
Now they are at season 2 and I'm just getting started what the Cultists are planning
Shadeurn, The Eldritch being that is older than the gods of Surrath. He betrayed his own kind to secure his safety in a war between the two parties. He was trapped inside the moon for eternity and only a gods clashing will begin setting him free. When one of my players were born, he was a demigod. His birth started a small conflict between the gods that begun Shadeurns return. As the creator of darkness and death he is slowly draining the life of the moon goddess as he grows stronger. He is slowly destroying the astral plane and the once he breaks out he will cause the moon to fall on to the planet wiping out the world.
The Night Ainok. They're a race of wolf-like people who stick to the shadows, only visiting cities to restock on weapons and armor... or slaughter individuals who defy their deities.
Their main god is the Raven Queen, goddess of the balance of Life and Death, as well as memory. They also revere a few nature gods.
Their elusive nature has earned them a fearful reputation among human cities, and an even worse reputation among High Elves. Once upon a time, High Elves marched across the land with their war-beasts and dragons, slaughtering and enslaving all in their wake. They were stopped by the Dwarves, Lizardfolk, and Wood Elves.
However, the Ainok were their worst enemies. The Ainok had a reputation for not just killing High Elves in the night, but leaving nothing behind but charred bones, some cracked open with the marrow sucked out. Even dragons were eaten by the Ainok. Fierce survivalists as they are, they believe meat of the defilers of nature shouldn't go to waste.
The Ainok were also the reason Mind Flayers fled the plane. The Ainok view the Elder Brains' dominion over memory an affront to their goddess, and use their magic to protect their minds and track down Mind Flayer colonies. With both Ainok and Gith hunting them, the Mind Flayers simply could not remain on this world.
It also doesn't help that the Ainok's closest allies are the Firbolgs, the race whose war magic was so strong that they toppled the ancient empire of Giants.
The Ainok are mostly based off the Magic: the Gathering Ainok from Tarkir, with a little recoloring and lore to fit the world.